Yuki Kajiura

Yuki Kajiura functions as a Japanese songwriter, composer, and music producer, with her output in pop, electronic, and classical idioms for anime series such as .hack//Sign, .hack//Roots, Noir, My-HiME, My-Otome, and Tsubasa Chronicle drawing the greatest attention. Although born in Tokyo, she passed part of her childhood in West Germany and composed her earliest song at the age of seven.

Following her college graduation and employment as an engineering programmer, her sustained engagement with music prompted her to join the all-female pop group See-Saw as keyboardist alongside lead singer Chiaki Ishikawa and Yukiko Nishioka. The ensemble issued I Have a Dream in 1993 and a subsequent self-titled album without Nishioka before entering a temporary hiatus in 1995.

Thereafter Kajiura launched a solo career, supplied material for other performers, and began writing and producing for television programs, video games, anime productions, commercials, and films, delivering her initial film score for the 1995 drama Tokyo Kyodai.

See-Saw reconvened in 2001 and participated in the anime series Noir, for which Kajiura supplied an ambient score. The group’s songs became opening and ending themes for multiple anime titles, among them the first ending theme for 2002’s Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, and they appear on numerous anime music compilations. In 2003 the band released its third album, Dream Field, the same year Kajiura put out the solo collection Fiction, which blended anime remixes with original tracks. See-Saw disbanded again in 2005 so that Ishikawa could pursue a solo career.

Kajiura renewed her collaboration with Noir director Koichi Mashimo on the 2007 series El Cazador de la Bruja and further anime projects. That same year she and Sony Music Japan established the all-female band Kalafina chiefly to perform Kajiura’s anime compositions; its members were Keiko Kubota, Hikaru Masai, Wakana Otaki, and Maya Toyoshima, with Toyoshima exiting after one year. She also scored the 2008 live-action film Achilles and the Tortoise and created FictionJunction, a platform through which individual vocalists performed her songs, among them Kalafina members Kubota and Otaki together with Yuriko Kaida, Asuka Kato, and Kaori Oda, each of whom appeared in anime via the venture. Kalafina released four studio albums: Seventh Heaven in 2009, Red Moon in 2010, After Eden in 2011, and Consolation in 2013.

Amid continued scoring for anime, film, video games, and television dramas, including the 2014 series Hanako to Anne, Kajiura issued her second solo album, Fiction II, in 2011.