Great figures who went through “Misunderstood”

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.

• Hirooka Asako — The Woman Who Never Leaned on Anyone

  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.

• Kukai (Kobo Daishi) — The Man Who Won Too Well with Words

  At twenty-four, he described his own stand-in as a monk with a head like a copper bowl and a face like a clay pot. With words he beat his relatives, moved foreign officials, and lost his closest friend. The stubborn, clumsy life of the man later called Kobo Daishi.

• 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.

• Mori Ogai — The Man Who Wanted to Be Taken Seriously

  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.

• 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.

• Nakahama Manjiro — The Man Who Became Japanese with Chopsticks

  "We could not understand anything about them, except that they were hungry." That is how an American captain described a drifting boy in his logbook. Ten years later the boy came home having forgotten Japanese, and was accepted as Japanese because he could use two chopsticks. The life of the man known as John Manjiro, a samurai who stayed a sailor to the end.

• 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.

• 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."