Natsume Sōseki

Born in 1867 as the Meiji Restoration began reshaping Japan, Natsume Kinnosuke was given up for adoption twice before graduating from Tokyo Imperial University as a scholar of English literature. The government sent him to London in 1900; he spent two years in poverty and racial isolation, suffering a severe nervous breakdown that shadowed the rest of his life. He returned to lecture at Tokyo Imperial, then broke through in 1905 with I Am a Cat, a satirical novel that made him famous. In 1907 he resigned to write full-time for the Asahi Shimbun - a first for Japan, the birth of the professional artist. He published a novel a year after that: Botchan, Sanshirō, Kokoro, each deeper into the psychology of the self against tradition. Stomach ulcers and recurring mental illness, including paranoid delusions, tracked him through the work. He died of complications at 49 in 1916, leaving Light and Dark unfinished and a canon that still defines modern Japanese fiction.