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On 6 August 1945, Ōta Yōko fled her mother's house in Hiroshima with her mother and sister, spent nights on the riverbank among the burned and dying, then took refuge in a countryside village. There, in the autumn of 1945, she wrote City of Corpses while short of paper and suffering radiation symptoms, uncertain she would live to finish it. Occupation censors delayed publication, and the book appeared in 1948 with cuts and in full in 1950.
Ōta describes looking at the corpses with two sets of eyes at once: a victim's eyes that recoil, and a writer's eyes that record. She treats the recording eye as an obligation rather than detachment, because an event this far outside prior experience is lost unless a survivor fixes it in words. The witness keeps looking specifically so that the unbearable becomes transmissible.
Weeks after the blast, people who had walked away uninjured began losing hair, developing purple spots, and dying. That turned survival into a waiting period rather than an escape. Because no one understood the cause, every survivor watched their own body for the same signs, and the fear itself became part of the injury. The bomb's damage therefore unfolded in time and could not be measured by the day of impact.