[1] In 1934, she married her fellow playwright Chikao Tanaka,[5] with whom she wrote plays for the Bungakuza theatre company.

After the end of World War II, she and her family were baptized as Catholics, an event that strongly influenced her work from then on.

[6] Tanaka started working in the film industry in the 1950s, a period considered to be the "second Golden Age" of Japanese cinema.

[7] She had a long collaboration with directors Mikio Naruse and Kinuyo Tanaka and adapted works by woman writers like Fumiko Hayashi and Aya Kōda.

Tanaka was an outspoken feminist, once stating that she wanted to "change the patriarchal system of Japanese society into something else during our generation".

[2] According to Toshirō Ide, her co-writer on Naruse's Repast, she left the project prematurely when the film studio insisted on a conciliatory ending instead of the female protagonist's divorce, as the two writers had originally intended.