Recipient of the 2021 Northern Lights Book Awards Poetry Category Haiku tell the story of the poet Basho and the diaries he wrote while walking throughout Japan in the 1600s. The seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho practically invented the haiku. He's most famous for his travel journals. But how did he come to be such a traveler in the first place? This delightful volume—composed entirely in haiku based on the poet's written travelogues and illustrated with vibrant hand-painted scenes—tells the true story of Basho's decision to abandon his comfortable city life and of the five great journeys he then took across the length and breadth of Japan.