Ota Yoko

Ota Yoko 

Born Nov. 18, 1906, in Hiroshima; died Dec. 10, 1963, in the prefecture of Fukushima. Japanese writer.

Ota’s first works, published in the 1930’s, adhered to the “art for art’s sake” trend and depicted mainly melodramatic romantic adventures, as seen in the novel The Shore of Wandering (1939) and the novella The Land of Cherries (1940).

Ota was in Hiroshima during the atom bomb explosion of 1945. This event proved to be a turning point in her work, which became imbued with a civic spirit and an awareness of her responsibility to her epoch. Ota’s principal postwar theme was the tragedy of the atomic catastrophe in Hiroshima; examples are the novellas City of Corpses (forbidden by the occupation authorities; published 1948), Human Rags (1951), and A Semihuman (1954) and the short stories Sick Leaves (1958) and The Lower Depths (1960). She decried atomic war and advocated peace. Ota died from the aftereffects of radiation.

WORKS

In Russian translation:
“Do kakikh por.” Inostrannaia literatura, 1955, no. 3.

REFERENCE

Rekho, K. “Khirosima i literatura.” In Ideologicheskaia bor’ba v literature i iskusstve. Moscow, 1972.

N. G. IVANENKO