The poet’s samurai name was Matsuo Munefusa, but we know him by the name he adopted in middle age. That name, Basho, is Japanese for a kind of banana plant with a sturdy stalk and fragile, easily torn fronds—features with which the poet identified. The banana plant that grew outside his simple house in Edo, the former name of Tokyo, figures in one of his contemplative haiku: “A banana plant in the autumn gale— / I listen to the dripping of rain / Into a basin at night.”