The year 1907 was a turning point in the author's life when he left his Tokyo University teaching position to write full-time for the daily Asahi Shimbun.

The older man of the three is known as Dōya-sensei (Master Dōya), once a teacher in the provinces who was forced to leave his post by villagers and students angered over his disrespectful attitude toward wealth and authority, now pursuing in Tokyo a career as an editor and writer, but barely eking out a livelihood, much to his wife's consternation.

By sheer coincidence, the three lives come together over the sum of one hundred yen (about a month's salary at the time): Nakano's gift to Takayanagi to convalesce at a seaside hot springs, Dōya-sensei's debts which are paid off with the purchase of his manuscript, and Takayangi's act of self-sacrifice and redemption.

[1] Thematically, Nowaki is linked to The Two Hundred Tenth Day (二百十日 Nihyaku-tōka), the short, lightweight work it follows, and to Gubijinsō, an overwrought melodramatic tragedy of a young woman unable to succeed in a man's world.

Nowaki has much in common with Mori Ōgai's short story Youth (青年 Seinen), in which Sōseki appears as a character named Hirata Fuseki, who lectures on literature and intellectual life.