Great figures who went through “Always borrowing”

Figures who went through this

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Sakamoto Ryoma — The Man Who Wrote That He Could Not Die

  I'm so lucky that I can't die, he wrote, even in places where people die. The twenty-seven-year-old wrote this to his sister, and in the very next letter he puffed out his chest: "Ahem, ahem." The vain, joke-telling thirty-one years of the man who said he would give Japan a good washing.