Great figures who went through “Dropped out”

Figures who went through this

• Ishikawa Takuboku — The Honest Liar

  "Back then I told lots of lies," he wrote in one of his own poems. He missed his own wedding, lived on loans from friends, and kept his family waiting. Then he began to write only plain words. His way of living, though, stayed the same to the end.

• Kukai (Kobo Daishi) — The Man Who Won Too Well with Words

  At twenty-four, he described his own stand-in as a monk with a head like a copper bowl and a face like a clay pot. With words he beat his relatives, moved foreign officials, and lost his closest friend. The stubborn, clumsy life of the man later called Kobo Daishi.

• Makino Tomitaro — The Man Who Spared Nothing

  "One who begrudges money cannot be a plant scientist." So wrote the only son of a sake shop when he was about twenty. He poured the family fortune into plants, and wrote about plants at a desk while court officers seized the furniture beside him. What held that life together was his wife, who joked that she was raising a spoiled son who wasted money on his hobby.

• Masaoka Shiki — The Greedy Invalid

  "My sickbed of six feet: this is my world." He sent his friend the bill for the eel, was turned down by the pupil he chose, and screamed when it hurt. Even so, five days before he died, he looked at his garden that morning and cheered on a natto seller. The story of a greedy haiku poet.

• Nakahara Chuya — The Man He Could Not Hate

  On the day his girlfriend left, he carried her breakable things to the house of the man she was moving in with. He wrote of that man as "my enemy." Twelve years later, he trusted him with his last book of poems. The bitter, hard-to-hate life of a poet who died at thirty.

• Okuma Shigenobu — The Man Who Said He Didn't Mind Losing It

  "The leg I should have cut off decades ago, and I managed to keep it until that day." A man who lost his right leg to a bomb said this. He called being thrown out of school a happiness, said even the illness that nearly killed him was not useless, and said even a lost leg was no great loss. This is the story of his brave front, and of the people who held it up.