Tourism finds its poetic form in the Japanese haiku and haibun. Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694), among the most revered of the haiku masters by modern poets, belonged to a tradition wherein removal and homosocial formations were inextricable from poetic practice. [2] Haiku, commonly translated from the Japanese into three-line poems with seventeen syllables (five syllables in the first and last lines, seven in the middle), are complicated little machines. Traditional haiku capture a moment in nature, speak of the poet’s emotional resonance with that moment, and also demonstrate the poet’s knowledge of the haiku tradition. Bashō’s most famous haiku, for reference (here translated into four lines):
Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond,
A frog jumped into water—
A deep resonance.