Her debut novel, Hyōten (氷点, "Freezing Point"), was published in 1964, and won the Asahi Shimbun's Ten Million Yen Award that same year.

She remained there for the rest of her life, even after becoming a best-selling writer, in spite of pressure to move to Tokyo, the center of Japan's publishing world.

Japanese scholars have compared her writing to that of Natsume Sōseki and Dazai Osamu, authors whose works had left a deep impression on her in her youth (Miura 1982).

Soon afterwards, she contracted tuberculosis, then caries of the spine (tuberculous spondylitis), which confined her to bed for thirteen years, seven of them in a body cast that restricted all movement.

Her life before her writing career began is described in the first volume of her autobiography Michi Ariki (1970), which was published in English translation under the title of The Wind is Howling (InterVarsity Press, 1977).