Shinto, Japan’s other major spiritual tradition, saturates Bashō’s poems as well, most noticeably in the importance given to place and the way that particular places come to embody certain feelings and themes. Shinto’s kami spirits live not in generality, abstraction, or paradise but embedded in the earthly, visitable, and local—shrines, mountains, islands, fields, and trees. Bashō’s lifelong practice of poetry pilgrimage joined Zen non-attachment with Shinto’s deep-seated spirits of place. *
