On September 1, 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed Tokyo and Yokohama and killed over 100,000 people. Among the survivors was a seventeen-year-old girl from a working-class neighborhood whose name does not appear in any official memorial record. Her name was Yōko Ōta.

Ōta was born in 1906 in Saeki, Hiroshima prefecture, and came to Osaka as a young woman to work and write. She published her first poems in local journals in the early 1930s, married a journalist, and was living in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945. She was two kilometers from the hypocenter and survived. She walked through the city for days afterward, documenting what she saw in a notebook.

City of Corpses, written immediately after and published in 1948 after extensive censorship battles with the American occupation authorities, is the most unflinching eyewitness account of Hiroshima's aftermath produced by anyone who survived it. The occupation censors reviewed and rejected it repeatedly. They permitted it only after removing passages describing radiation sickness and burns in specific detail — passages Ōta restored in later editions.

She spent the remaining years of her life fighting radiation sickness, which she called "the atomic bomb disease," and writing. Half-Human (1954) and Fireflies (1953) continued her documentation of hibakusha — atomic bomb survivors — at a time when Japanese society was trying to move past what had happened. She died in 1963 at fifty-six.

Her work was out of print in Japan for over two decades after her death. It was rediscovered by feminist scholars in the 1980s, who noted that the male hibakusha narratives — Hara Tamiki, Ibuse Masuji — had remained continuously in print.