Great figures who went through “School & study”

"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.

"Being a doctor or a monk is no work for a grown man with arms and legs." That, it is said, was how a young man felt when he entered a medical school only as a trick. Later he snapped at his bosses, cut down his own teacher's theory, and quit with all his staff when his institute was moved to a government office. What was the one piece of advice this man who never listened finally kept?

"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.

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.

"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.

"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.

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.

"The leg I should have cut off decades ago, and I managed to keep it until that day." A man who lost his right leg to a bomb said this. He called being thrown out of school a happiness, said even the illness that nearly killed him was not useless, and said even a lost leg was no great loss. This is the story of his brave front, and of the people who held it up.

My hands and feet are tied. I cannot hear, and I cannot speak. A seventeen-year-old girl wrote this from inside her own family's house, in the country where she was born. The life of the woman now on Japan's new 5,000-yen bill, who kept searching for a place to belong.