Great figures who went through “Lost a child”

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.

• Kano Jigoro — The Man Who Never Said "I'm Tired"

  "How do you do that move?" Every time he asked, the young man got thrown instead of answered. He was small, hated losing, and left the whole household to his wife. Even on a ship at seventy-seven, it is said, he answered that it did not hurt. The life of the father of judo.

• 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.

• 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.

• Ninomiya Sontoku — The Man Who Won It Back and Let It Go

  "You have no house. You have no fields." His uncle scolded him, and the boy, the story goes, covered his lamp with his robe and kept on reading. The fields he spent seventeen years buying back, he sold off with his own hands. The man known for the statue of a boy carrying firewood, and the life the statue leaves out.

• 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."