芭蕉の句碑(住吉公園)

A stone carrying a verse by the poet Matsuo Basho: having bought a measure, his mind changed, and so much for the moon-viewing. In the ninth month of Genroku 7 (1694) Basho came to Osaka from his home at Iga Ueno, by way of Nara and the Kuragari pass, to settle a quarrel between two of his pupils. On the thirteenth he worshipped at the Takara-no-Ichi rite of Sumiyoshi Taisha and bought one of the measures sold along the approach. He was already unwell, and that night he did not go to the moon-viewing gathering he had been invited to but went back to his lodging. At the next day's gathering he read the measure verse, and is said to have apologised for the evening before with a joke: he had gone and bought a one-go measure, his mood changed with it, and going home to sleep early came to seem better than looking at the moon. Fever and dysentery followed, and Basho lay ill in a back room of the Hanaya Niemon house in Osaka; on the evening of the twelfth of the tenth month his life ended, at fifty-one. The stone with the Takara-no-Ichi verse stands at the east entrance of Sumiyoshi Park, put up in Meiji 1 by the Osaka haiku society Naniwa Gekkasha for the 170th memorial of Basho.

Translated from the Osaka Prefecture and Osaka City tourist listings (観光施設一覧, CC BY 4.0).