stylistic:tone, linguistic:paraphrasing, information:classification
Early life

Matsuo Bashō was born in 1644, near Ueno, in Iga Province. The Matsuo family was of samurai descent, and his father was probably a musokunin (無足人), a class of landowning peasants granted certain privileges of samurai.

Little is known of his childhood. The Matsuo were a major ninja family, and Bashō was trained in ninjutsu. In his late teens, Bashō became a servant to Tōdō Yoshitada (藤堂 良忠) most likely in some humble capacity, and probably not promoted to full samurai class. It is claimed he served as cook or a kitchen worker in some near-contemporaneous accounts, but there is no conclusive proof. A later hypothesis is that he was chosen to serve as page (koshō) to Yoshitada, with alternative documentary evidence suggesting he started serving at a younger age.

He shared Yoshitada's love for haikai no renga, a form of collaborative poetry composition. A sequence was opened with a verse in 5-7-5 mora format; this verse was named a hokku, and would centuries later be renamed haiku when presented as a stand-alone work. The hokku would be followed by a related 7-7 mora verse by another poet. Both Bashō and Yoshitada gave themselves haigō (俳号), or haikai pen names; Bashō's was Sōbō (宗房), which was simply the on'yomi (Sino-Japanese reading) of his adult name, " Munefusa (宗房)." In 1662, the first extant poem by Bashō was published. In 1726, two of Bashō's hokku were printed in a compilation.

In 1665, Bashō and Yoshitada together with some acquaintances composed a hyakuin, or one-hundred-verse renku. In 1666, Yoshitada's sudden death brought Bashō's peaceful life as a servant to an end. No records of this time remain, but it is believed that Bashō gave up any possibility of samurai status and left home. Biographers have proposed various reasons and destinations, including the possibility of an affair between Bashō and a Shinto miko named Jutei (寿貞), which is unlikely to be true. Bashō's own references to this time are vague; he recalled that "at one time I coveted an official post with a tenure of land", and that "there was a time when I was fascinated with the ways of homosexual love": there is no indication whether he was referring to real obsessions or fictional ones. (Biographers of the author, however, note that Bashō was involved in homosexual affairs throughout all his life and that among his lovers were several of his disciples; in Professor Gary Leupp's view, Bashō's homoerotic compositions were clearly based on his personal experiences). He was uncertain whether to become a full-time poet; by his own account, "the alternatives battled in my mind and made my life restless". His indecision may have been influenced by the then still relatively low status of renga and haikai no renga as more social activities than serious artistic endeavors. In any case, his poems continued to be published in anthologies in 1667, 1669, and 1671, and he published a compilation of work by himself and other authors of the Teitoku school, The Seashell Game (貝おほひ, Kai Ōi), in 1672. In about the spring of that year he moved to Edo, to further his study of poetry.