In his college days, he started a literary magazine "Shin-shichou"( 新思潮, a new trend of thought)　with his classmates: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Masao Kume, Kan Kikuchi and Yuzuru Matsuoka (松岡譲).

In it are fully described the hope and despair of Japanese intellectuals who were at a loss in a sudden flood of Western cultures after the Meiji Restoration.

In his college days, he often put in an order at the bookstore for foreign books such as "Collected Drawings of Aubrey Beardsley".

[6][7] In March 1918, he set sail from New York for Europe at the risk of being attacked by German U-boats, hoping to do volunteer work for the Red Cross.

He arrived safely in Paris, but as the artillery fire from Germany became severe, he was evacuated to Ryon.

In Geneva, in a small island on the lake Leman, he happened to visit a statue of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose philosophy would become a longterm subject of Naruse's research.

We now know the details of their discussions, because Rolland wrote down every single word that Naruse told him in his "Journal des Années de Guerre" (November, 1916～1918), (Éditions Albin Michel, Paris).

On his way home from Switzerland, Naruse stayed in Pairs for a while, where he luckily encountered with the victory celebration of the World War I.

Naruse and Matsukata went around art dealers and galleries such as Durand-Ruel and Bernheim-Jeune, often with Yukio Yashiro.

Naruse bought a bust of Victor Hugo by Auguste Rodin (the original plaster figure) from Bénédite himself.

[10][11][12][13][14][15] His literary researches were mainly on French Romanticists in the 18th and 19th century such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Gautier, Flaubert and Montesquieu.

Naruse's study of Romanticism covered not only literary works and theatrical arts, but also personal histories of writers, the social trends and the living conditions of the periods.

In teaching each novel, poem or play, he shed light on the personality of the writer, took the social context into account, and cited examples from the original text.

His successful lectures were supported by his dozens of neatly written notebooks in which he organized his massive amount of research material gathered through many years.

He studied in Paris for 8 months, focusing on the theme: the influence of Lord Byron on the French Romanticism.

His successor as a researcher of French and comparative literature was one of his students, Yukio Ōtsuka(大塚幸男), who became a professor at Fukuoka University in later years.