Great figures who went through “Judged by looks or rumors”

Figures who went through this

• Date Masamune — The Man Who Played Tough to the End

  "If you make a statue of me after I die, make both eyes right." Ashamed of his one blind eye, this man sent a robe to the mother who is said to have poisoned him. When his head was on the line, he brought up that eye himself. The last thing he left his daughter was a reply that stopped after one line.

• Dazai Osamu — The Man Who Pretended to Talk in His Sleep

  A boy who wanted his father's fountain pen could only ask for it by pretending to talk in his sleep. He lied, borrowed money, and even begged a prize committee, "Please give it to me." The embarrassing, hard-to-look-away life of a writer.

• 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.

• Miyamoto Musashi — The Master Who Never Met His Time

  "I did not win because I had mastered the art of fighting." The man who never lost wrote this at sixty. He never served any lord, was laughed at by a child for being a coward, and failed at a painting in front of his lord. The proud, bluffing life of a swordsman.

• Murasaki Shikibu — The Woman Who Wouldn't Write Even "One"

  "I do not even write the character for 'one.'" The woman who wrote that also wrote a very long story. Her father sighed over her, the court gossiped about her, and in the end she put everything she had hidden into one letter and asked: "When you have read it, please send it right back." This is her story.

• 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."