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Makoto Furukawa

Makoto Furukawa is an actor, born 1989.

Makoto Furukawa was born in Kumamoto in 1989 and spent six years at Space Craft Entertainment before going freelance in September 2018. That same year he debuted as a solo singer under Lantis with "miserable masquerade", produced by Satoru Kuwabara, and in December he signed with the record label Toy's Factory. In 2020 he took the Best Supporting Actor award at the 14th Seiyu Awards.

His signature role is a joke about voice acting. As Saitama in One-Punch Man he plays a hero who wins every fight instantly and is therefore bored, which means the performance is built almost entirely on withholding: flat delivery, no push, the comic timing sitting in the pauses. It works because he has the range to break it, and the show gets its biggest laughs when the flatness cracks. Miyuki Shirogane in Kaguya-sama: Love Is War runs the same trick in reverse, a student council president whose composure is a permanent, exhausting performance.

Elsewhere he plays open rather than closed. Taiju Oki in Dr. Stone is all volume and sincerity, Banri Tada in Golden Time is a lead built from uncertainty, and Shorter Wong in Banana Fish is the friend whose warmth makes a brutal show survivable. He has also voiced two different versions of Sherlock Holmes, one of them in Moriarty the Patriot. Between the leads sit dozens of small parts, a Kakushi in Demon Slayer, Ear in Vinland Saga, Gustaf in The Seven Deadly Sins, which is what a working seiyu career actually looks like.

Movies (22)

TV (109)

Where to start with Makoto Furukawa

Begin with One-Punch Man, because the whole performance is legible in one episode: a bald man in a yellow jumpsuit sounding mildly inconvenienced by an apocalypse. If you want to hear him act rather than deadpan, Kaguya-sama: Love Is War is the pick, and the contrast between the two roles is the case for him as a lead.

Dr. STONE shows the loud, uncomplicated end of his register, and Golden Time is the earlier lead, a straightforward college romance, and useful for hearing him before the deadpan became a trademark. Banana Fish is the one that will surprise you; Shorter Wong is a supporting part played with real tenderness inside a very grim series.

Moriarty the Patriot rounds it off with his Sherlock Holmes, pitched as a delighted nuisance rather than a great mind. Skip the bit parts unless you are completist about it.

One-Punch Man and the comedy leads

Saitama is a performance of calibrated boredom and it is far harder than it sounds. Kaguya-sama asks for the exact opposite, a man whose entire inner life is frantic overthinking, and the contrast between the two is the argument for him.

The prestige series

The best-made shows on his list. Vinland Saga is the finest of them and one of the great modern anime. Oddtaxi is the strangest and the most tightly plotted, and Banana Fish is the bleakest by some distance.

The big shonen and isekai

The large series where he is usually somewhere in the ensemble. Dr. Stone gives him the most to do, and Solo Leveling and Kaiju No. 8 are the current mass-audience shows on the list.

Genres Makoto Furukawa works in