Masayo Kurata

Masayo Kurata's busiest years line up almost exactly with the turn of the century, when late-night anime was expanding fast and a voice actress with a flexible upper register could work constantly. Born in 1969 in Yokkaichi, she arrived as the medium was shifting from television for children towards television for the people who had grown up on it.

Her defining role is Shinobu Maehara in Love Hina, the shy junior in a house full of louder women, a part assembled almost entirely out of hesitation, and she carried it through the specials as well as the series. The counterweight is Rakshata in Code Geass, a scientist who talks as though nothing in the world is urgent, dropped into a show that shouts constantly. Fasalina in Gun x Sword asks for something closer to menace. Between those poles sit Karinka in Steel Angel Kurumi, Koyomi in Girls Bravo, Lucie Ascham in the hard science fiction of Planetes, and Scherice Adjani in s-CRY-ed.

She has also done a great deal of video game work, including Souffle Rossetti in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, Ai Senou in Hourglass of Summer and Chizuru Sakaki in the Rumbling Hearts and Muv-Luv visual novels, which is where a large share of that generation's voice acting actually lived. Recent credits are smaller and more scattered, mostly ensemble work in the Girls und Panzer films, which is the normal shape of a career this long.