Haiku to what is now called "haiku". Bashō also used his "hokku" as torque points within his short prose sketches and longer travel diaries. This subgenre of "haikai" is known as "haibun". His best-known work, "Oku no Hosomichi", or "Narrow Roads to the Interior", is counted as one of the classics of Japanese literature and has been translated into English extensively. Bashō was deified by both the imperial government and Shinto religious headquarters one hundred years after his death because he raised the haikai genre from a playful game of wit to sublime poetry. He continues to be revered as a
Mora (linguistics) moraic system of writing. For example, in the two-syllable word "mōra", the "ō" is a long vowel and counts as two morae. The word is written in three symbols, モーラ, corresponding here to , each containing one mora. Such scholars also argue that the 5/7/5 pattern of the haiku in modern Japanese is of morae rather than syllables. The Japanese syllable-final "n" is also said to be moraic, as is the first part of a geminate consonant. For example, the Japanese name for "Japan", 日本, has two different pronunciations, one with three morae ("Nihon") and one with four ("Nippon"). In