Yayoi Ogawa is a Japanese manga artist known for creating stories that often explore unconventional relationships and the complexities of adult life. Born in Kanagawa Prefecture, Ogawa is a graduate of Tama Art University, where she studied fine arts. Before committing to manga full-time, she worked as a journalist for a major newspaper, an experience that likely informed the realistic career settings in her later works. She made her professional debut as a mangaka in 1994 with the short story Sugao ni Kiss Shite, which was published in Kodansha's Kiss magazine, a publication where she would serialize the majority of her work.

Ogawa is best known as the creator of Kimi wa Pet, a manga series that achieved significant critical and popular success. The story, which follows a high-powered professional woman who keeps a younger man as a pet, originally ran in Kiss from 2000 to 2005 and was collected in fourteen volumes. The series won the Kodansha Manga Award in the shoujo category in 2003, sharing the honor with Chika Umino's Honey and Clover. Its unique premise and exploration of modern relationships resonated widely, leading to multiple adaptations. The first was a Japanese television drama in 2003, followed by a South Korean film adaptation in 2011, and then another Japanese television drama in 2017.

While Kimi wa Pet remains her most internationally recognized title, Ogawa has created a diverse body of work primarily aimed at the josei demographic, which targets adult women. Other notable series include Baby Pop, a two-volume story about a young woman who ends up living with her stepfather after her mother's death. She also created Candy Life, a shorter work about a woman torn between two men. From 2006 to 2011, she serialized Kiss & Never Cry, a drama about a young woman pursuing her dream of becoming a competitive figure skater. This series showcased her ability to blend sports narratives with romantic and emotional character development. A later work, Ginban Kishi, also known as Knight of the Ice, returned to the world of figure skating. This romantic comedy features a serious health magazine writer and her childhood friend, a world-famous but otaku figure skater who can only perform his best jumps when she recites lines from his favorite magical girl anime. While most of her work is josei, she has also experimented with the shonen genre, most notably with the supernatural series Baroque.

Ogawa's artistic identity is often defined by her focus on the internal lives of her characters. Her stories frequently center on women navigating the pressures of their careers and society, and they are known for their thoughtful, and sometimes eccentric, examination of love and human connection. Her significant contribution to the josei genre, particularly the success of Kimi wa Pet, helped pave the way for more manga targeting adult women to find an audience both in Japan and internationally.