Murayama was initially encouraged towards watercolors and traditional Japanese painting, but was later drawn to philosophy, particularly the works of German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

[1][3] During his stay in Berlin, he developed connections to European avantgarde artists, facilitated particularly by Herwarth Walden and his gallery and book store Der Sturm, e.g. Italian Futurists.

In Berlin, Murayama had the occasion to pick up the latest developments in the visual arts, in music, performance and theater.

[1][5] The "Mavoists" sought to eliminate the boundaries between art and daily life and rebelled against convention by combining industrial products with painting or printmaking in a collage.

[5] As part of his efforts to bring art into everyday reality, Murayama and others helped design the Aoikan movie theater in Akasaka, Tokyo.

[4] He applied many of the same techniques and aesthetic modes from his paintings into the realm of drama,[7] including elements from German expressionism, Dadaism, futurism and other avant-garde European movements.

[5][2] He wrote and produced Marxist-inspired versions of Robin Hood and Don Quixote, which reflect his thinking that entertainment should play a vital sociopolitical objective.

In 1929, Murayama again greatly alarmed the authorities by producing Borokudanki ("Record of a Gang of Thugs"), a drama glorifying a 1923 incident on the Jingguang railway in China, where Chinese communist labor union leaders incited their disgruntled workers to riot, and in the ensuing mob violence, murdered the railway managers and sabotaged the equipment before being violently suppressed by the military.

He quickly followed this with numerous other works over the next couple of years, including efforts to revitalize the genre of shimpa and to produce new forms of kabuki.

In his later years, he devoted his energies to publishing compilation of plays, writing an autobiography[1] and continuing to fight for intellectual freedom.