Matsuo Bashō is read about 978 times a day, in 171 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 390 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?He walked Japan's back roads in the 1600s turning three-line poems into an art form that outlasted empires. Bashō made haiku what it became - though he thought his real genius was in the collaborative verse chains almost no one remembers now.
Also in Deutsch
Photos 8
In their own words 9
, Even if you have three or four extra syllables - or as many as five or seven - you need not worry as long as the verse sounds right.
Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.
I feel lonely as I gaze at the moon. I feel lonely as I think about myself, and I feel lonely as I ponder upon this wretched life of mine.
About this person
Born Matsuo Kinsaku in 1644, he came to poetry young and by the time he'd settled into Edo's intellectual circles he was already known across Japan, teaching for a living. Then he walked away from it - left the urban literary scene and spent years wandering west to Kyoto and Nara, east, deep into the northern wilderness, chasing what the road could teach. His travel essays like Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton in 1684 carried that restlessness into prose. He worked in haikai no renga, the collaborative linked-verse form, and believed that's where his real work lived - "Many of my followers can write hokku as well as I can. Where I show who I really am is in linking haikai verses." But it was the standalone hokku, later called haiku, that survived him. He died November 28, 1694, and left poems now carved into monuments across Japan - small perfect things built from what he saw firsthand, a scene caught in a few sharp elements.
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