Ishikawa Takuboku: Debt King, Genius Poet, Gone at 26
A child prodigy from Iwate who dropped out of school, moved to Tokyo at 16, wandered Hokkaido, borrowed from 60 people (roughly 16 million yen in today's values), skipped his own wedding, wrote his diary in romanized Japanese to hide it from his wife — and still produced one of modern Japanese poetry's masterpieces before dying of tuberculosis at 26.