Great figures who went through “Barely getting by”

Figures who went through this

• Higuchi Ichiyo — The Woman Who Said the Roadside Was Fine

  "My whole life will be torn and torn again, until I fall by the roadside as a beggar." At twenty-one, she said this to a man she visited under a false name. She asked for loans and was turned down, she cursed in her diary, and she did not believe it when people called her a genius: the twenty-four years of Higuchi Ichiyo.

• 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.

• Noguchi Hideyo — The Man Who Could Never Pay It Back

  His classmates each gave a small coin after his essay about his burned hand was shared with the class. From that day on, he kept borrowing, spending it all, and asking again. The messy, lovable life of the man who was once on Japan's 1,000-yen bill.

• Takamura Chieko — The Woman Who Could Not Show Her Work

  "There is no sky in Tokyo," she sighed. As a young woman she would hardly bring her paintings even to the man who would become her husband, and after one rejection she stopped entering exhibitions. On her last day, that same woman put into her husband's hands the paper pictures she had gathered together herself.

• Yanagiwara Byakuren — The Woman Who Lied All the Time

  She was a poet, the wife of a coal-mine king, and people called her the "Queen of Tsukushi." Years later she said: I could not get through my days unless I was lying all the time. One autumn day at thirty-five, in front of a friend, she began to cry. "I'm thinking of doing something like falling off a cliff."