Miyuki Sawashiro

The instrument is the thing to understand first: a low, dry, slightly amused voice that lands somewhere between a teenage boy and a woman in her forties and can be pushed convincingly to either end. Miyuki Sawashiro, born in Nagano in 1985, has turned that into hundreds of credits as an actress and narrator, and one of the most heavily booked careers in Japan.

That range is the career. She plays Kurapika in Hunter x Hunter, a boy driven by a grudge, and Puchiko in Di Gi Charat, a tiny child; she plays Sinon in Sword Art Online II, a sniper far more controlled than the people around her, and Bishamon in Noragami, a warrior god with a small army of dependants. Celty Sturluson in Durarara!! is the technical showpiece, a character who communicates by typing rather than speaking, so the entire performance is interior monologue. She is also Kanbaru Suruga in the Monogatari series, Izuna Hatsuse in No Game No Life, Fujiko Mine in the later Lupin the Third entries, Shinku in Rozen Maiden and Mordred in Fate/Apocrypha.

Games account for as much of her modern fame as anime does, and none of it appears on this site: the Raiden Shogun in Genshin Impact, Acheron in Honkai: Star Rail, Ivy Valentine in Soulcalibur, Jolyne Cujoh in the JoJo fighting games, Akane Kurashiki in Zero Escape. What her catalogue rows here mostly show is the other half of a working seiyu's life, one-off parts done well: Mosquito Girl in One-Punch Man, Kana Kimishima in Parasyte, Saeko Busujima in Highschool of the Dead, Brunhilde in Record of Ragnarok, Sakura Suzuhara in the last two Evangelion films.