The greatest master of haiku, born in Iga Ueno. After serving a local samurai family he moved to Edo, became a professional haikai poet and lived in a hut at Fukagawa named for the banana plant that gave him his pen name. He transformed haikai from wordplay into serious literature, founding a style prizing austerity, patina and lightness. His journeys produced a series of travel sketches, above all The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the account of his 1689 walk of some 2,400 kilometers through northern Japan with his disciple Sora, which contains the verse on the swift Mogami River. He died in Osaka in 1694 while traveling.
五月雨を あつめて早し 最上川
Gathering all the rains of May — / how swift it runs, the Mogami River.