Shinoe Shoda was a Japanese poet and author known for her atomic bomb literature

Atomic bomb literature

is a literary genre in Japanese literature used to describe writing about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This can include diaries, testimonial or documentary accounts, poetry, drama or fictional works based around the bombings....

. Shoda was born in Hiroshima

Hiroshima

is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture, and the largest city in the Chūgoku region of western Honshu, the largest island of Japan. It became best known as the first city in history to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon when the United States Army Air Forces dropped an atomic bomb on it at 8:15 A.M...

. She graduated from Aki Girls' High School in 1928. In 1947, evading Occupation censorship, she secretly published “Sange” (“Penitence”), a tanka

Tanka

Tanka may refer to:* Tanka, a form of Japanese waka * Tanka prose, a literary genre which combines tanka poems and prose* Thangka, a pictorial representation in Tibetan Buddhism...

anthology. She continued to write poems, memoirs, and children's tales until her death from breast cancer. Unfortunately she did not live long enough to see the publication of her second tanka collection, “Sarusuberi” (“Crape myrtle”), published in 1966. “Reiko” along with “Chanchako bachan” (“Old woman in chanchako, or a padded sleeveless jacket”), was posthumously published in “Dokyumento Nihonjin” (“Document of the Japanese”) in 1969. “Pikakko-chan” contains seven stories, including “Reiko” and “ Chanchako bachan”