1644 to 1694
Matsuo Bashō
Matsuo Bashō is born in 1644 at Akasaka in Iga Ueno, now Iga in Mie, into a farming family of musokunin rank; the month and day go unrecorded. His name is Munefusa. At nineteen he serves Tōdō Yoshitada and learns haikai from Kitamura Kigin. Yoshitada dies in 1666, and in 1672 Bashō goes down to Edo and works on the Kanda waterworks. In the winter of 1680 he withdraws to a hut in Fukagawa; the pupil Rika plants a bashō, a banana, beside it, and from 1682 he signs by that name. He travels from 1684, writing Nozarashi kikō and Oku no hosomichi, and dies at Ōsaka in 1694. Aston, in 1899, writes that he “imported a more serious element, and greatly refined and improved the Haikai, until it became a formidable rival to the Tanka”.