[5] In 1910, her mother Kiku Hayashi divorced her merchant husband Mayaro Miyata (who was not Fumiko's biological father) and married Kisaburo Sawai.

[4] After graduating from high school in 1922, Hayashi moved to Tokyo and lived with several men, supporting herself with a variety of jobs,[5][6] before settling into marriage with painting student Rokubin Tezuka in 1926.

In 1942–43, again as part of a larger group of women writers, she travelled to Southeast Asia, where she spent eight months in the Andaman Islands, Singapore, Java and Borneo.

[3][10] Writer Yoshiko Shibaki observed a shift from poetic sentiment towards harsh reality in Hayashi's post-war work, which depicted the effects of the war on the lives of its survivors, as in the short story Downtown.

Joan E. Ericson's 1997 translations and analysis of the immensely popular Diary of a Vagabond and Narcissus suggest that Hayashi's appeal is rooted in the clarity with which she conveys the humanity not just of women, but also others on the underside of Japanese society.