In linked poetry, modern renku and Edo-period haikai no renga, the ideal of “linking by scent”, nioizuke in Japanese, is regarded as typical for the haikai tradition that followed after Matsuo Bashô. Today it is often used as a generic concept for “Bashô-style verse linking”, but there is not much research done about its background and possible meanings. The modern way of understanding this concept probably originates from an argument by Torahiko Terada, in which it is linked to the montage technique of Western cinema. This understanding has been adapted by several haikai scholars, and eventually it becomes connected with the metaphor theory of Roman Jakobson in an article by Haruo Shirane. The aim of this paper is to deconstruct this modern way of understanding the nioizuke by demonstrating how it has been discussed in older texts and treatises. Analyzing some of the works written by several of Bashô's disciples and followers in later centuries and the often enigmatic descriptions of this “scent” and similar concepts they give, it will be suggested that there originally was no single and generic concept, but several related words which were used to describe ideals very different from the basically structural montage or metaphor theories of modern scholarship. A proposal of a more useful definition of the concept will be made and a few verse links will be interpreted from this perspective to demonstrate the usability of the concept in its supposedly more original form.