When Bashō was twenty-two, Yoshitada, his boyhood friend, supporter, and possibly lover, died. This loss, ten years after the death of his father, resulted once again in a kind of chrysalis-expulsion. Some accounts say Bashō entered a monastery immediately after his friend’s death; others report that he fathered a child. Based on the poet’s own later comments, he seems to have passed through something akin to what the Amish refer to as “wilding,” a period of sampling everything the sensual world has to offer.
