Sasaki was at home, about 1.6 kilometres (1 mi) away from ground zero, when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Her grandmother ran back inside and died near the house, apparently trying to escape fires by hiding in a cistern.

Subsequently, she was diagnosed with acute malignant lymph gland leukemia (her mother and others in Hiroshima referred to it as "atomic bomb disease").

In August 1955, she was moved into a room with a girl named Kiyo, a junior high school student who was two years older than her.

Sasaki's friend, Chizuko Hamamoto, told her the legend of the cranes and she set herself a goal of folding 1,000 of them, which was believed to grant the folder a wish.

However, an exhibit that appeared in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum stated that by the end of August 1955, Sasaki had achieved her goal and continued to fold 300 more cranes.

After her death, Sasaki's friends and schoolmates published a collection of letters in order to raise funds to build a memorial to her and all of the children who had died from the effects of the atomic bomb, including another Japanese girl Yoko Moriwaki.

[7] The most well-known version of Sasaki's story is Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, a children's historical novel written by Canadian-American author Eleanor Coerr and published in 1977.

[8] Her story has become familiar to many schoolchildren around the world through the novels The Day of the Bomb (1961, in German, Sadako will leben) by the Austrian writer Karl Bruckner.

Sadako is also briefly mentioned in Children of the Ashes, Robert Jungk's historical account of the lives of Hiroshima victims and survivors and about Japan World War II.

[citation needed] The death of Sasaki inspired Dagestani Russian poet Rasul Gamzatov, who had paid a visit to the city of Hiroshima, to write an Avar poem, "Zhuravli", which eventually became one of Russia's greatest war ballads.

by the death metal/metalcore band Heaven Shall Burn features a song called "Passage of the Crane" dedicated to her story, as does "Sadako's Wings of Hope" on Niobeth's album Silvery Moonbeams.[when?

The song "Unfinished Dream Of Sadako" by the Iranian post-rock band, Crows in the Rain, is dedicated to her story.