Chūya Nakahara was born in Yamaguchi, where his father, Kensuke Kashimura, was a highly decorated army doctor.

Due to the high expectations of his father, Nakahara was given a very strict education, which also prevented him from enjoying an ordinary childhood.

In light of these events, he was transferred to the Ritsumeikan Middle School in Kyoto, where Nakahara begin to live alone but still, and until the end of his days, at the expense of his family.

After completing Junior High School, Chūya and Yasuko decided to follow Tominaga to Tokyo, on the basis of attending university there.

His verse has been considered somewhat obscure, and confessional and gives a general impression of pain and melancholy, emotions which were a constant throughout the poet's life.

Initially, Nakahara favored poetry in the Japanese traditional tanka format, but he was later (in his teens) attracted to the modern free verse styles advocated by the Dadaist poet Takahashi Shinkichi and by Tominaga Tarō.

After he moved to Tokyo, he met Kawakami Tetsutaro and Shōhei Ōoka, with whom he began publishing a poetry journal, Hakuchigun (Group of Idiots).

He was befriended by the influential literary critic Kobayashi Hideo, who introduced him to the French symbolist poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, whose poems he translated into Japanese.

Nakahara displayed different emotions in his poems, which according to Rachel Dumas was often “confusion, ennui, anger, gloom, and apathy”.

In December 1927, he met composer Saburō Moroi, who later adapted a number of his verses to music, such as Asa no Uta (朝の歌, "Morning Song") and Rinjū (臨終, "Deathbed").

Nakahara married Takako Ueno (a distant relative) in December 1933, and his first son, Fumiya, was born in October 1934.

In February, he was released and moved back to Kamakura, as he could not stand to continue living in the house which contained the memories of Fumiya.

He left a number of his works with Kobayashi and was making plans to return to his hometown of Yamaguchi when he died in October 1937, at the age of 30, of tubercular meningitis.

Only one of his poetry anthologies, Yagi no Uta (山羊の歌, "Goat Songs", 1934) was published while he was alive (in a self-financed edition of two hundred copies).

Kobayashi Hideo, to whom Nakahara entrusted the manuscript for Arishi Hi no Uta on his deathbed, was responsible for the posthumous promotion of his works.