The focus is on the rural mountain village of Magome-juku lying across the highway between Tokyo and Kyoto, which was used by the Tokugawa shogunate as a posting station or shukuba (宿場) in Japanese. Following a character modeled closely after Tōson's own father Shimazaki Masaki, the novel carries its story through the turbulent decades before and after the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate sparked by the arrival of Commodore Perry's ships in 1853. The protagonist Aoyama Hanzō, a devout follower of Hirata Atsutane's idealistic nativism but tied down by his duties as the head of Magome-juku, observes the tide of events leading to the opening and Westernization of Japan.

In the years after the Japanese Civil War of 1868, the Hirata movement achieves its initial goals and becomes superficially incorporated into the new bureaucracy, but deteriorates into political impotence and is gradually expelled by the progressive-minded leadership. Hanzō, fearing that Japan's native values and way of life will be discarded and forgotten by future generations enamored by things Western, is driven insane by despair and ultimately dies after being imprisoned by his own family.

Historical characters mentioned or appearing in the story include the following. Fictionalized names used in the story are included in parentheses.

In their review of the novel, Publishers Weekly said that "the author's supreme achievement is to dramatize wrenching social and political change at the level of individual response" and that what made the story so readable is the "viable link between event and character, coupled with Toson's limpid, low-key style".^[1]

Before the Dawn was adapted into a film of the same name released in 1953, with a screenplay by Kaneto Shindō and directed by Kōzaburō Yoshimura (吉村 公三郎 Yoshimura Kōzaburō). It was also later adapted into a play by the American playwright Joseph Stein.

Before the Dawn was translated into English by William E. Naff and published by University of Hawaiʻi Press on April 1987 (798 pages, ISBN 0-8248-0914-9). Naff's translation won the Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 1987.

• Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, the German novel described by the translator William E. Naff as the closest European analogue to Before the Dawn - another historical story similarly depicting the downfall of an ancient family after the feudal society to which it belonged disappeared in the 19th century

• Yoakemae is now an open source text:

Part 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b (in Japanese)