Ogawa was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya, Hy?go, with her husband and son. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Professor's Beloved Equation has been made into a movie. In 2006 she co-authored "An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics" with Masahiko Fujiwara, a mathematician, as a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers.

A film in French, L'Annulaire (The Ringfinger), directed by Diane Bertrand, starring Olga Kurylenko (the new Bond girl in her film début) and Marc Barbé, with a soundtrack by Beth Gibbons, was released in France in June 2005 and subsequently made the rounds of the international film festivals; the film, some of which is filmed in the Hamburg docks, is based in part on Ogawa's Kusuriyubi no hy?hon (?????), translated into French as L'Annulaire (by Rose-Marie Makino-Fayolle who has translated numerous works by Ogawa, as well as works by Akira Yoshimura and by Edogawa Rampo, into French). (The dockland setting and a significant subplot owe nothing to Ogawa's novella. Interestingly, in conversation with the audience after a showing of the film at the Edinburgh Film Festival, 2006, Diane Bertrand said that she was not sure that she understood the book.)

Kenzabur? ?e has said, "Yoko Ogawa is able to give expression to the most subtle workings of human psychology in prose that is gentle yet penetrating." The subtlety in part lies in the fact that Ogawa's characters often seem not to know why they are doing what they are doing. She works by accumulation of detail, a technique that is perhaps more successful in her shorter works; the slow pace of development in the longer works requires something of a deus ex machina to end them. The reader is presented with an acute description of what the protagonists, mostly but not always female, observe and feel and their somewhat alienated self-observations, some of which is a reflection of Japanese society and especially women's roles within in it. The tone of her works varies, across the works and sometimes within the longer works, from the surreal, through the grotesque and the ...sometimes grotesquely... humorous, to the psychologically ambiguous and even disturbing. (Hotel Iris, one of her longer works, is more explicit sexually than her other works and is also her most widely translated.)

Most frequently translated (though not yet in English)

• The Ring Finger (Kusuriyubi no hy?hon, ?????, 1994; available in French, German, Greek, Italian)
• Love in the Margin (Yohaku no ai, ????, 1991; available in French, German)
• The Museum of Silence (Chinmoku hakubutsukan, ?????, 2000; available in French, German)

Other works (some translated to French)

• Kanpeki na by?shitsu, ?????, 1989
• Agehach? ga kowareru toki, ????????, 1989, Kaien Prize
• Same nai k?cha, ??????, 1990
• Shug? taimu, ???????, 1991
• Angelina sano motoharu to 10 no tanpen, ?????????????10???, 1993
• Y?sei ga mai oriru yoru, ?????????, 1993
• Hisoyaka na kessh?, ??????, 1994
• Rokukakukei no sh? heya, ???????, 1994
• Anne Furanku no kioku, ???????????, 1995
• Shish? suru sh?jo, ??????, 1996
• Yasash? uttae, ??????, 1996
• K?ritsui ta kaori, ???????, 1998
• Kamoku na shigai, midara na tomurai, ???????????, 1998
• Fukaki kokoro no soko yori, ???????, 1999
• G?zen no shukufuku, ?????, 2000
• Mabuta, ???, 2001
• Kifujin A no sosei, ???A???, 2002
• Burafuman no mais?, ????????, 2004, Izumi Prize
• Yo ni mo utsukush? s?gaku ny?mon, ??????????, 2005 (An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics)
• Inu no shippo o nade nagara, ???????????, 2006
• Otogibanashi no wasuremono, ????????, 2006 (illustrated)
• M?na no k?shin, ??????, 2006 (illustrated), Tanizaki Prize
• Umi, ? 2006
• Ogawa Y?ko taiwa sh?, ???? ???, 2007 (conversations)
• Monogatari no yakuwari, ?????, 2007