[3][4] While she is most known for her stories of complicated and messy romantic love, she also writes on the daily minutiae of life (slice-of-life), child-raising, and bullying.
Though her works garnered some attention, even receiving praise from Japanese literary critic Jun Etō (江藤淳, Etō Jun), she only achieved widespread recognition in 1985, when Bedtime Eyes won the Bungei Prize and was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize.
[citation needed] Through her depiction of the child's perspective on the world, she was nominated yet again for the Akutagawa Prize (and subsequently again for The Piano Player's Fingers), though she did not receive it.
In May 2006, three of Yamada's novellas (Bedtime Eyes 「ベッドタイム･アイズ」, The Piano Player's Fingers 「指の戯れ」 and Jesse「ジェシーの背骨」) were published in English translation (translators: Yumi Gunji and Marc Jardine) as a single volume by St Martin's Press under the collective title Bedtime Eyes.
In an interview with Bungei Shunjū upon winning the Akutagawa Prize, Risa Wataya and Hitomi Kanehara named Yamada's Afterschool Music as one of their major influences, explaining that her works were one of the greatest depictions of modern Japan.