On August 6, 1945, the atomic bomb detonated above Hiroshima at 8:15 in the morning. Yōko Ōta was in the city. She survived.

Ōta was born on November 12, 1906, in Saeki, near Hiroshima. She had been writing since the 1930s — poetry, autobiographical fiction, stories about women's lives in pre-war Japan. By 1945 she was established enough to have her work collected and discussed, though her reputation rested primarily in the regional literary world rather than the Tokyo center that dominated Japanese publishing.

After August 6, she wrote about nothing else.

City of Corpses was completed in 1947. It is one of the first — and most unflinching — literary accounts of the bomb's immediate aftermath: the burns, the people dying in the streets, the silence where a city had been, the bodies in the river. It circulated in manuscript form because the American Occupation censored all accounts of the bombing that might, as SCAP put it, "disturb public tranquility." The censorship remained in effect until 1952. Ōta's manuscript sat unpublished.

When occupation censorship ended, she published. City of Corpses appeared in 1950, Human Rags in 1951 — both documenting the hibakusha experience with the specific attention of someone who had been there and kept notes. She was one of the first writers to use the word hibakusha — bomb-affected person — to build a moral and political category around the survivors' experience.

The American literary response to the bombing, shaped by John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946), focused on six survivors whose stories were legible to an American audience as human without being accusatory. Ōta's work was accusatory. It named what had been done and to whom. It did not arrange the suffering for Western readability.

She received the Women's Literature Prize and the Tamura Toshiko Prize. She died in 1963 from leukemia — a late effect of radiation exposure. Her literary reputation outside Japan remains thin.