Episode notes
The serene Zen poet of popular imagination was born in Iga province, the historical heartland of the ninja, and trained in ninjutsu before entering the service of a young nobleman, Todo Yoshitada. This episode strips away the stereotype to follow Matsuo Basho through the Edo period, from the competitive, social art of haikai no renga he shared with his lord, to the grief of Yoshitada's death in 1666, a mysterious decade of wandering, and viral success as a teacher in Edo by 1680.
Miserable amid superficial literary circles, Basho retreated to a hut in Fukagawa, took his name from the banana tree his students planted there, then lost the hut to fire in 1682 and his mother soon after. The conversation follows him onto the dangerous Edo highways in 1684, where he expected to die and instead found his voice, through the famous frog and the ancient pond, the 150-day, 2,400-kilometer journey with his apprentice Sora that produced The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and his final philosophy of karumi, or lightness, before his death in Osaka in 1694.
- Haikai no renga as a 17th-century improv battle rather than solitary composition
- Why fame in Edo felt like burnout and drove Basho across the river
- The bandit-ridden highways where childhood survival training kept him alive
- The frog poem that sparked a citywide contest and a new way of seeing
- Deification in 1793, Masaoka Shiki's critique, and a crater on Mercury