Yuki Kodama is a Japanese manga artist born on September 26 in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture. She made her professional debut in 2000 with the series Zakuro, which was published in the manga magazine Cutie Comic. In the early to mid-2000s, she continued to publish short-form works in publications such as Cutie Comic and Vanilla.

Kodama is best known as the creator of Sakamichi no Apollon, known in English as Kids on the Slope, which was serialized in the magazine Monthly Flowers from 2007 to 2012. The story, set in the 1960s in her hometown of Sasebo, depicts the friendship between two high school boys who bond over their shared love of jazz music. Kodama has stated that she chose jazz for the series because of its connection to the American military base in Sasebo and because its improvisational nature had a conversational aspect that lent itself well to expression in manga. The series was a critical success, ranking as the top manga for female readers in the 2009 edition of the Kono Manga ga Sugoi! guidebook and winning the 57th Shogakukan Manga Award in the general category in 2012. In 2012, Kids on the Slope was adapted into a television anime series directed by Shinichiro Watanabe. The series also inspired a live-action film adaptation.

Following the conclusion of Kids on the Slope, Kodama created Tsukikage Baby, a drama serialized in Monthly Flowers from 2013 to 2017 that focuses on the lives of several families in a traditional Japanese town and incorporates the Owara traditional folk dance. The series was ranked third for female readers in the 2014 Kono Manga ga Sugoi! rankings. Her subsequent works include Chiisako no Niwa, published from 2017 to 2018, and Ao no Hana, Utsuwa no Mori, which began serialization in 2018. A recurring element in Kodama's work is her focus on music and dance, translating auditory and performance-based art forms into the visual medium of manga, as seen in the jazz of Kids on the Slope and the traditional dance in Tsukikage Baby. Her stories are often set in detailed, real-world locations, and she has noted her use of local dialects to capture the atmosphere of a place. Her series Chiisako no Niwa placed eighth in the 2019 Kono Manga ga Sugoi! rankings for female readers.