He obtained his medical license at a very young age and introduced translated German language literary works to the Japanese public.

Mori stayed at the residence of Nishi Amane, in order to receive tutoring in German, which was the primary language for medical education at the time.

After graduation, Mori enlisted in the Imperial Japanese Army as a medical officer, hoping to specialize in military medicine and hygiene.

According to "Wakaki hi no Mori Ogai" by Keiichiro Kobori, the controversy was focused on eight points including the origin of the Japanese people and the treatment of the Ainu people, food and clothing, public health, manners and customs, the influence of oil painting techniques on Japanese painting, Buddhism and myth, the effectiveness of the modernization movement, and the future of Japan.

Naumann pointed out that Japan opened its door to the international relations from the external forces and had easily and superficially accepted Western civilization.

Pushed by this idea, Ogai at first started to spend time on enlightening the public and other intellectuals by introducing the aesthetic scientific method which he obtained in the West.

Given the background of the time where a lot of policies and ideas were based on the idealistic theory, Ogai’s enthusiasm could be fully explained.

His view on the modernization of Japan was distinctive from other intellectuals in the point where he was very critical to the absence of the rationale basis in the scientific field, especially medicine.

[5] Another concern regarding the process of the modernization was the potential that the reckless importation of Western culture could bring the destruction to the Japanese traditions, which Ōgai found in a sense unique and original to the West.

Meanwhile, he also attempted to revitalize modern Japanese literature and published his own literary journal (Shigarami sōshi, 1889–1894) and his own book of poetry (Omokage, 1889).

The short story "The Dancing Girl" (舞姫, Maihime, 1890) described an affair between a Japanese man and a German woman.

In February 1899, he was appointed head of the Army Medical Corps with the rank of surgeon major-general and was based in Kokura, Kyūshū.

[9] In this position, he led a faction of doctors from Tokyo Imperial University who asserted that beriberi was an endemic disease caused by an unknown pathogen, ultimately ensuring that the Japanese army lagged significantly behind research worldwide and even within the nation.

In 1884, naval surgeon Takaki Kanehiro concluded his experiments showing that the disease was a thiamine deficiency caused by sailors' diet of polished white rice; this advice had been adopted by the Japanese Navy by the time of Russo-Japanese War.

By 1926, the Nobel Prize had been awarded to Christiaan Eijkman and Sir Frederick Hopkins for research on thiamine deficiency they had conducted in the late 19th century.

Mori's first notable work is The Dancing Girl" (舞姫, Maihime, 1890) a story chronicling the love affair between Ōta Toyotarō, a Japanese law student studying abroad in Berlin, and a German dancer, Elis.

Toyotarō, recalling his experiences aboard a boat in Saigon, writes that he came to Germany on a government scholarship, having been a model student in Japan.

Toyotarō continues an impoverished life with Elis until the arrival of his old friend Aizawa Kenkichi, who is working for the government official Count Amakata.

[11] The Dancing Girl, according to literary scholar Tomiko Yoda, is generally regarded as one of the first works of Japanese literature to incorporate first-person narration in relation to modern modes of subjectivity.

[15] English-language scholars like Christopher Hill have focused on the themes of nationalism in the story, with Toyotarō torn between returning to Japan and continuing the development of a modern nation-state, or staying in the cosmopolitan city of Berlin with his lover Elis.

This period includes Vita Sexualis and his most popular novel, Gan (雁, The Wild Geese, 1911–13), which is set in 1881 Tokyo and was filmed by Shirō Toyoda in 1953 as The Mistress.

[17] Mori Ōgai, during the period he was writing Vita Sexualis, focused on making a statement regarding the current literary trends of modern Japanese literature.

His writing style, depicted from the Meiji government's perspective, derived from naturalism and was implemented with his thoughts that were brought up from writers who focused on the truth.

[7] Ogai expressed his concern towards the intellectual freedom after High Treason Incident in 1910 where socialists and anarchists were unfairly executed by the court on suspicion of the assassination of the Japanese Emperor Meiji.

His later works link his concerns with the Ministry of Education regarding the understanding of "intellectual freedom" and how they police and dictate the potential of literature.

[7] During the time from 1912 to 1916 saw a shift in his writing work from fictions to historical stories, influenced by the shocking news of Nogi Maresukea’s death, a general of the Imperial Japanese Army.

Why Ōgai was inclined to investigate the history, or in other word, the identity of Japan, was partially because of his personal matter in which he was struggling to take a balance between West and East.

[18] Sansho Dayu was an early Japanese work written in the mid 1600's, and Ogai's rewrite of it essentially changed some minor details and the ending, wherein which the bailiff's punishment is not given as much attention as in the original, and it is not so much violent as it is politically appropriate.

Starting with her 1961 novella, A Lovers' Forest (恋人たちの森, Koibito Tachi no Mori), she wrote tragic stories about love affairs between older men and boys in their late teens which influenced the creation of the Yaoi genre, stories about male-male relationships, written by women for women, that began to appear in the nineteen seventies in Japanese novels and comics.

He never returned to Tsuwano or visited this house again; however, in his writings he reminisced that his childhood home was in a compound surrounded by earthen walls and had a gate like a samurai residence.