Maaya Sakamoto

Maaya Sakamoto (坂本真綾; born March 31, 1980, in Itabashi, Japan) is a Japanese singer-songwriter, voice actress, and actress signed to FlyingDog. She began working as a child performer and moved into dubbing and voice acting at a young age, taking her first leading role as Chifuru in the OVA Little Twins. In 1996 she became widely known as Hitomi Kanzaki in The Vision of Escaflowne and made her singing debut the same year with "Yakusoku wa Iranai (約束はいらない - No Need for Promises)", the opening theme for "Escaflowne", starting a J-pop recording career closely linked to anime music and character performance. Her early music work included repeated collaborations with composer and producer Yoko Kanno. She later expanded into self-produced music while continuing her acting and voice work. Songs including "Platinum", "Hemisphere", "gravity", "Tell Me What the Rain Knows", and "Triangler (トライアングラー)" marked different stages of her anime-related discography, and her 2011 album You can't catch me became her first Oricon number-one album. Alongside music, she has voiced characters such as Haruhi Fujioka in Ouran High School Host Club, Shinobu Oshino in Monogatari, Shiki Ryōgi in The Garden of Sinners, Ciel Phantomhive in Black Butler, and Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell: Arise, and she appeared as Éponine in the musical Les Misérables from 2003 to 2009. In 2026, she announced the best album "Yoin" (余韻), which collects her theme songs for Fate/Grand Order, and she also appeared in the music video for "Clock" (時計).