[1] Born in Tokyo in 1960, Arai expressed her creativity early on as a sophomore at Metropolitan High School of Igusa when she entered the science fiction magazine Kiso Tengai’s first competition for new writers.
[2] At age 16, she received an honorable mention and praise from prominent science fiction writer Shinichi Hoshi for her short story entry Inside Myself.
Writing the entire story in the language of a contemporary teenage girl with minimal Kanji, Arai established a precedent for an emerging genre of shojo and young adult.
Although Asuka attempts to live a life of normalcy by dying her hair black and working at a coffee shop, she is driven to suicide by the recurrence of the song of her mother.
Green Requiem was also produced into a live action film directed by Akiyoshi Imazeki in 1988 and starred Eiji Okada and Shinobu Sakagami.
In 1999, Arai returned to the science fiction genre with her novel, Tigris and Euphrates, which details a society's plan to populate a new world with artificially grown life.