Great figures who went through “Career & work”

"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.

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.

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 a party, nobody could open a bag fastened with a puzzle ring. A man sitting at the lowest seat thought for a while, and opened it. He was offered a fief of two hundred koku, was mocked as a "yamashi," a swindler, and in the end struck down a man for reasons no one knows. His friend carved a question on his grave: why was even his death so far from ordinary?

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.

"When I lose, what kind of face will the people of Japan have when they look at me?" At nineteen, setting out alone for Sweden, that was what frightened her most. The story of the first Japanese woman to win an Olympic medal, who could never stay aloof.

"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.

"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.

"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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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."