It is set in a near-future Japan, and begins with a girl, Jyujo Aoba, who has been in a coma since she was nine years old, who was discovered next to her parents' bodies, with their hearts inside her stomach.

The series was serialised in Shogakukan's Flowers between September 2002 and August 2005 and collected in four volumes.

In 2006, Otherworld Barbara won the Grand Prize of the 27th Nihon SF Taisho Award Hagio "wanted to do something about meat" when she created the story for Otherworld Barbara, and felt that the story "turned out kind of gross".

[1] Thorn felt that Hagio also used her interest in the right and left brain, and the origin of language.

She read Noam Chomsky's Noam Chomsky on The Generative Enterprise, A discussion with Riny Hyybregts and Henk van Riemsdijk, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, and Andrew B. Newberg's Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief.