In 1938, he was admitted to the Takushoku University's School of Commerce, but his education was interrupted by frequent illness.
During this time, he began reading detective novels, and was especially a fan of Freeman Wills Crofts, whose stories often had a railway theme, typically with an apparently unbreakable alibi focused on the intricacies of railway timetables.
His debut novel under the name of Tetsuya Ayukawa was The Petrov Case about a rich Russian émigré's death in Dalian, which won a one-million yen prize in a contest run by the magazine Jewel in 1949.
[2] Ayukawa first wrote the manuscript while a student in Manchukuo; it was lost during the war, and he re-wrote the story for the contest.
In 1972, he launched another mystery series, in which the protagonist is an amateur detective who is also a bartender in the Ginza district of Tokyo.