[4] Her father served as president of Kokugakuin University, was a member of the House of Peers, and was later credited with establishing the foundations of modern Japanese linguistics.

She was also strongly influenced by her paternal grandmother, who introduced her to the Japanese classics such as The Tale of Genji, as well as to Edo period gesaku novels and to the kabuki and bunraku theater.

[7] A precocious child, at age 13, her reading list included the works of Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Kyōka Izumi, Kafū Nagai, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, and especially Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, whose sado-masochistic aestheticism particularly fascinated her.

As a child she also gained access to many rare texts when Basil Hall Chamberlain, a mentor in linguistics to her father, donated his entire library of over eleven thousand books to the family before leaving the country in 1910.

However, her interest in the theatre was encouraged by her father, and as a young woman, she attended the lectures of Kaoru Osanai, the founder of modern Japanese drama.

This was followed by A Restless Night in Late Spring ( 晩春騒夜 Banshun sōya), which was published in the September 1928 issue of the magazine Women's Arts (女人芸術, Nyonin Geijutsu) and performed at the Tsukiji Little Theatre in December 1928.

Her novel is a violent, harrowing tale of family misfortune and physical and emotional deprivation, based partly on wartime personal experiences, and in 1954 won the Women's Literature Prize.

The novel is set in the Meiji period and analyzes the plight of women who have no alternative but to accept the role assigned to them in the patriarchal social order.

[8] Three of her stories were selected for the Tanizaki Prize in 1969: Shu wo ubau mono (朱を奪うもの), Kizu aru tsubasa (傷ある翼) and Niji to shura (虹と修羅).