Happy birthday to Japanese seiyuu Ai Kayano! Today is her 36th birthday, so it’s a great time to review her career and appreciate all the amazing roles she brought to life for us. What’s your favorite Ai Kayano voice role?
Happy Birthday to Ai Kayano! How Did She Become a Seiyuu?
Ai Kayano always wanted to do work that “healed” people and worked in the beauty industry as an aesthetician before becoming a seiyuu. She was watching Aria the Animation one night and started imagining herself working as a voice actress. She felt she could succeed as a voice actress because her customer service training had included voice training to sound cute and pleasant to customers.
After graduating from the Pro Fit Voice Actor Training Institute, she started work doing background parts. Her first break came when she won the role of Meiko “Menma” Honma in AnoHana, also proving her chops as a singer with the show’s ending theme, “Secret Base.”
Other roles came quickly: Shiro in No Game No Life, Utaha-senpai in Saekano, Mashiro Shiina from Sakura-sou no Pet an Kanojo, Darkness in Konosuba and Rin Toyama in New Game! She plays the role of Sylphy in the currently airing Mushoku Tensei II.
Ai Kayano’s hobbies are walking and visiting random cafés she encounters along the way. She loves soba noodles, fermented soybeans and wine.
What Are Your Favorite Roles by Ai Kayano? Let’s Explore Them Below.
Let’s check out the twelve most popular roles by Ai Kayano in today’s post!
Mashiro from The Pet Girl of Sakura-sou. A hugely popular role that won Ai-chan many fans around the world. All fans just loved the boke-character Mashiro, who was so dazed she would sometimes forget to wear pantsu.
Shiro from No Game No Life. Another popular role that fans really loved. We love it all the more because it seems we will never get a damned Season 2…
Sylphiette/Fitz from Mushoku Tensei. Another enigmatic character is the half-human, half-elf Sylphy, who Rudeus taught to use magic many years ago. I wonder if she has the power to cure the medical condition that plagues him?
Darkness from Konosuba. Another popular role is the masochistic Darkness from Konosuba, a role that really allows Ai Kayano to have fun with her voice acting.
Menma from AnoHana: The Flower We Saw That Day. One performance that ensured no fans could watch without a box of tissues nearby was AnoHana, the story of a girl who drowned many years ago and then returned as a ghost to hang out with her friends and help them manage their various psychoses.
Why am I a fan of anime writer Mari Okada? Here’s a blog post for you!
Utaha Kasumigaoka from Saekano: How To Raise a Boring Girlfriend. One of the best-executed harem anime in recent memory, this was a very self-aware series featuring an experienced senpai, a tsundere childhood friend and a quiet girl who is the titular “boring girlfriend.” Ai Kayano’s performance as Utaha-senpai, also known as “best girl,” was amazing.
Inori Uzuriha from Guilty Crown. A popular anime with a big budget, this was an early lead role for Ai.
Saori Takebe from Girls und Panzer. Another major role is Saori from Girls und Panzer, who is perfect for Ai Kayano’s voice acting skills.
Rin Toyama from New Game! She also plays Rin from everyone’s favorite lesbian video game development company.
Ai Fuyuumi from Oreshura. There was a time when the tsundere character archetype was so closely tied to Rie Kugimiya that no one could imagine another seiyuu pulling off a character like that. But Ai Kayama’s voicing of this character from the (criminally underrated) Oreshura was legendary.
Nagi Aiza from Your Lie in April. A legendary anime that was a thing of beauty, it told the story of 14-year-old piano prodigy Kosei Arima, who’s so amazing he inspires other people around him to work hard at their music. Although there’s an expectation Kosei will marry his childhood friend Tsubaki, as a fan I was adamant that he instead end up with Nagi.
Why are “depressing anime” some of the best? Read this blog post and find out!
Mamako Oosiki from Okaa-san Online. Finally, another fun role by Ai Kayano was Mamako from Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?, which fans have decided will be named Okaa-san Online instead. The slime attack scene was fucking awesome.
Thanks for reading this blog post celebrating the amazing career of Japanese seiyuu Ai Kayano. What’s your favorite role by her? Post it in the comments below!
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