Where Did Bashō Gō?

Bashō on the road

So who is this Bashō, and which back roads did he take to which far towns and places (see post directly below this one)? Born Matsuo Kinsaku in 1644, in the Iga Province of Japan, he became the most famous haiku (or hokku) poet of his day. And really, his haikus are so open and honest, so real and so evocative as to touch all the senses at once. For example, this one:
an ancient pond
a frog jumps in
the splash of water
   He was a restless spirit, by all accounts, but he also had a sense of humor:
now then, let's go out
to enjoy the snow ... until
I slip and fall!
   Around 1682, Bashō ("Matsuo" was his family name, "Bashō" a pen name he took on after receiving a gift of bashō trees from a student) began the first of the many months-long walking journeys that
became the subject of so many of his later works. He created a new format, alternating prose and haiku, called haibun, to describe his travels. During his last long walk, Bashō fell ill. His last haiku is simple and profound and endearing in its essentially human connection:
falling sick on a journey
my dream goes wandering
over a field of dried grass
   Centuries later, in 2008, writer Howard Norman walks the same roads taken by Bashō and chronicles his adventure for National Geographic. In this interactive map, he presents a kind of travelog. "Over the past 51 days," he writes at his last stop, "I have visited most of the sites that [Bashō] and his disciple Kawai Sora visited. Their journey took them to places of military, spiritual, and literary significance. Mine was a literary peregrination, a wandering scholarship, that took me from Tokyo north through the backwater towns and highlands, the Three Mountains of Dewa, along the Japan Sea, and finally to Rakushisha, Basho’s 'Cottage of Fallen Persimmons' in Kyoto": http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/02/bashos-trail/bashos-trail-interactive