[1] In the same magazine, in 1984, she started publishing the series Fancy Dance about a Buddhist monk who is trained in becoming the new head of the temple.
In 1989, she won the Shogakukan Manga Award in the shōjo category for Fancy Dance.
For the series Onmyōji, based on an original work by Baku Yumemakura, she received the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 2001[3][4] and the Seiun Award in 2006.
[6] She went on to produce a sequel version, Onmyōji: Tamatebako, which was serialized from 2011 until 2017 in the comic magazine Melody.
Tomoko Yamada assesses that her style is influenced by sentiments of women's media: "One can see this in the graceful beauty of the conduct of Okano’s characters, the picturesque and polished structure of every frame, and the emphasis on subtlety in story development.