She met the novelist Kinoshita Naoe, who persuaded her to enter the Meiji-Jogakkō, a Christian-orientated girls’ school in Tokyo.

In the 1910s, Nogami submitted poems and short stories to the mainstream literary journal Chuo Koron, Shincho, and to the feminist magazine Seito, and gained a substantial following with fans of the proletarian literature movement.

She maintained a correspondence with fellow female writers Yuasa Yoshiko and Miyamoto Yuriko, with whom she shared the sentiment that literature must serve a purpose towards increasing morality and social activism.

1957), a shocking semi-factual account of four men in the crew of a wrecked fishing boat who must struggle with the choice of starvation or cannibalism.

In the post-war period, she resumed her contacts with Miyamoto Yuriko, and joined her in the foundation of the Shin Nihon Bungakukai.