[1] Taking advantage of the opportunities presented by the expanding Japanese empire, she left Takahashi and his sisters with their grandparents in the rural town of Nōgata and went to Tientsin in mainland China to be with a lover.

His first book to receive national attention was Rose Tree, Fake Lovers (薔薇の木･にせの恋人たち, Bara no ki, nise no koibito-tachi), an anthology published in 1964 that describes male-male erotic love in bold and direct language.

A laudatory review from the critic Jun Etō appeared in the daily newspaper Asahi shimbun with Takahashi's photograph—an unusual instance of a poet's photograph included in the paper's survey of literature.

Other close friends Takahashi made about this time include Tatsuhiko Shibusawa who translated the Marquis de Sade into Japanese, the surreal poet Chimako Tada who shared Takahashi's interest in classical Greece, the poet Shigeo Washisu who was also interested in the classics and the existential ramifications of homoeroticism.

With the latter two writers, Takahashi cooperated to create the literary journal The Symposium (饗宴, Kyōen) named after Plato's famous dialogue.

"[5] Many of these early works have been translated into English by Hiroaki Sato[6][7][8] and reprinted in the collection Partings at Dawn: An Anthology of Japanese Gay Literature.

In 1970, he published Twelve Views from the Distance about his early life and the novella The Sacred Promontory (聖なる岬, Sei naru misaki) about his own erotic awakening.

For instance, in 2010, Takahashi has also produced a slim book of poems to accompany a 2010 exhibition of the work of the American artist Joseph Cornell.