Masaki, who showed an increasingly eccentric behaviour and suffered from hallucinations, was interned by his family in a self-built cell and died when Shimazaki was only fourteen.

[1] Shimazaki was baptised in 1888 while studying at the Christian Meiji Gakuin University, where he befriended essayists and translators Baba Kochō and Shūkotsu Togawa.

He took first steps in writing and contributed to a literary magazine titled Sumire-gusa, until its publication was prohibited by the university's headmaster Yoshiharu Iwamoto.

[1][2] The story follows a burakumin schoolteacher torn between the promise given to his father to keep his outcaste status a secret and his wish to confess his origin to people close to him.

The deaths have later been ascribed to possible malnutrition as a result of the family's financial constraints at the time of the writing, for which Shimazaki faced harsh criticism, among others from writer Naoya Shiga.

Shimazaki was disowned by his brothers Hirosuke (who had tried to keep the affair a secret) and Hideo, and confronted with severe criticism from readers and fellow writers like Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

[1] The alienation between the family members following the publication of Shinsei led to Shimazaki not even being informed of the death of his sister (and closest relative) Sono.

[1] He published Before the Dawn (1929–1935), a historical novel about the Meiji Restoration from the point of view of a provincial activist in the Kokugaku (Nativism or National Learning) school of Atsutane Hirata.

[2] In 1936 he traveled to Buenos Aires to represent Japan at the International PEN Club meeting there, also visiting the United States and Europe on this voyage which lasted six months.

The following year, he turned down the invitation to join the recently reorganised Imperial Academy of the Arts (Teikoku Geijutsuin) on the grounds of personal reasons.

[2] In 1943, he began serialising a sequel to Before the Dawn, Tōhō no mon ("The gate to the east"), taking its title from a painting by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.