Mary Yukari Waters was born in 1965 in Kyoto, Japan. The daughter of a Japanese homemaker and an Irish American physicist, Waters lived in Kyoto until the age of nine, when her family moved to a small logging town in Northern California, where she spent the rest of her childhood and adolescence. Although she lived in the United States after the age of nine, Waters frequently visited relatives in Japan after moving to California. After studying economics in college, Waters worked as a certified public accountant in Los Angeles for many years, before starting to write fiction at the age of 30.

In 2003, Waters published her first collection of short stories entitled The Laws of Evening, in which "Aftermath" appears. The short stories in The Laws of Evening focus on the lives of people living in Japan after World War II, and although the stories are not autobiographical...