Born into an upper class family and strict Confucian moral but also received a thorough Western education that awakened his passion for French literature Maupassant, Baudelaire and André Gide. Harvested early successes with their stories, but the tendency of the young to the dissipated and dilettante neighborhoods leisure life, caused his father to send away from Japan. On his return to Tokyo, his prolific literary activity focused on the interest in women's neighborhoods pleasure geishas, ​​waitresses and prostitutes who were to Kafu vestiges of a past that had always been better; a past described with delicacy and wistful autobiographical traces in his male characters: Geishas rivals (1917), In the rain (1931) and A strange story east of the River (1937). In 1952 he was awarded the medal of the Order of Cultural Merit, died in Tokyo in 1959.