Great figures who went through “Lost a family member”

"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.

As a child, he let his head be shaved without crying, because sake was the reward. He grew up resolved never to let joy or anger show, yet to the man who looked after his household accounts and errands, he was someone who let joy and anger show without hiding them. The proud, bluffing life of the man once on Japan's 10,000-yen bill.

"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.

At about twelve, she was forbidden to read. She held up the house she married into, went down into a coal mine, and joined the people building a university for women. On Christmas Day at sixty-two, she asked to be placed among the children being baptized.

"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.

"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.

"Looking at a book, no good. It must be only your story, your words, your thoughts." That is what a husband said to his wife when she told him old tales with a book in her hand. Most of the stories in Kwaidan, his book of Japanese ghost stories, were told to him by her. Her name is not on the cover.

"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.

A twenty-four-year-old army doctor turned down a dance at a masked ball: "I am a foreigner. I cannot dance." Two and a half years later, a woman followed him from Germany to Japan. The story of a man who got truly angry about how others saw him, and who in the end turned down every title.

"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.

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.

"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.

"I submitted my application again, and again it was turned down." Four times, a woman was refused a place in the exam for doctors, only because she was a woman. When the door finally opened, she would one day walk out of it on her own. The earnest, hard-to-sum-up life of the first woman in Japan to pass the exam and become a doctor.

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."