[6][page needed] He graduated from the Gakushuin Peer's Elementary School in 1906 and started studying English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, but left two years later without a degree.

[1] The story Ōtsu Junkichi, published in Chūō Kōron in 1912, his first publication for which he received a fee, was an autobiographical account of his affair with the former housemaid Chiyo and the familial conflicts.

[4][7] While working on Ōtsu Junkichi, Shiga had read the English translation of Anatole France's novel The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, which he cited as an important influence on his own writing.

[6] He followed with a series of short stories and A Dark Night's Passing (An'ya koro, 1921–1937); the latter, his only full length novel, was serialized in the socialist magazine Kaizō and is regarded as his major work.

[11] Shiga's work influenced many later writers,[1][3] including Kazu Ozaki, Kiku Amino, Motojirō Kajii, Takiji Kobayashi, Fumio Niwa, Kōsaku Takii, Kiyoshi Naoi, Toshimasa Shimamura, Hiroyuki Agawa and Shizuo Fujieda.

[1][6][12] Jun'ichirō Tanizaki praised the "practicality" (jitsuyō) of Shiga's style, in which he discovered, with reference to At Kinosaki, a "tightening up" (higishimeta) of the sentences: "[…] any word that is not absolutely necessary has been left out".

[7] These included the short stories A Gray Moon (Haiiro no tsuki, 1946) and Yamabato (1951), or essays like Kokuko mondai (1946), in which he proposed to make French the national language of Japan.