Ōta was born as Fukuda, Hatsuko in Hiroshima city, her parents divorced when she was eight and she moved to live with the Fukuda family. As a young girl she read Takuboku Ishikawa and Shusei Tokuda, as well as Goethe and Heine. She also read and was influenced by Tolstoi. After graduating high school she worked as a primary school teacher and took various secretarial jobs, moving frequently among Tokyo, Osaka, and Hiroshima. She married in 1926 but absconded, leaving one child. On the invitation of Kan Kikuchi, she came to Tokyo in 1926, where she began to work as a magazine reporter. Whilst working as a waitress in Osaka she began to write serious fiction, in around 1929. Ota worked her way into the literary scene through her involvement in the activities of several literary magazines, contributing to journals such as Nyonin Geijutsu. In 1940, Ōta's war novelSakura no kuni was awarded a prize by the Asahi newspaper, and received considerable public acclaim. In August 1945 she experienced and survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Stricken with the fear that she would become a victim of radiation sickness, she worked feverishly to complete Shikabane no machi, an account of her experiences in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing. The novel was written in the autumn of 1945, but then was censored and finally published three years later with portions deleted. This was followed by Ningen ranru, which was awarded the Women's Literary Prize. “City of Corpses” was first published in 1948, and Hotaru in 1953. Han ningen, first published in 1954 and awarded Peace Cultural Award, portrays the struggle with mental illness of an author threatened by radiation disease and fears of an impending world war. As Yale professor John Whittier Treat wrote in his book Writing Ground Zero, the critical reception of Half-Human justified Ōta's reputation as "a bitter, disturbed, and perhaps even deranged woman whose writings on Hiroshima deserve to be discounted as equally bitter, disturbed, and deranged themselves." The effects of the bomb caused her physical condition to deteriorate and she reached the limits of her literary work. She changed her style to first person narratives of internal mental states. The four-volume “Ōta Yōko shū” edited by Ineko Sataet al., was published posthumously in 1981. Ōta died suddenly of a heart attack in 1963, whilst bathing in a hot spring in Inawashiro, Fukushima.
