Natsume Sōseki

Sōseki was born in Edo the last of eight children, promptly given away to foster parents and returned twice before his own family reclaimed him. He trained as a scholar of English literature, taught school in the provinces, and in 1900 was dispatched by the Ministry of Education to London, where poverty and isolation nearly broke him. He later called those two years among the unhappiest of his life.

Back in Tokyo he took over Lafcadio Hearn's old lecturing post, then abandoned the university altogether to write full-time for the Asahi newspaper, serializing novel after novel: I Am a Cat, a satire narrated by a nameless housecat, made him famous overnight; Kokoro, Botchan, and the Sanshirō trilogy followed.

Chronic stomach ulcers shadowed his last decade and killed him at forty-nine, in the middle of serializing his final novel, Light and Darkness, left unfinished.