Noriko Hidaka

Noriko Hidaka, born Noriko Ito, has been one of the load-bearing voices of Japanese animation since the 1980s, with well over a hundred credits in this catalogue alone, and the reason is a narrow and extremely useful ability: she can play a boy. Not a woman doing a boy, but the thing itself, high and flat and unsentimental. Near in Death Note, Sojiro Seta in Rurouni Kenshin and Shalnark in Hunter x Hunter are all young men voiced by a woman in her thirties and forties, and not one of them sounds like a stunt.

The other register is the older sister. She was in her mid twenties when she voiced Satsuki in My Neighbor Totoro in 1988, the girl who does all the worrying so her little sister does not have to, and the film depends on that voice sounding capable and frightened in the same breath. Akane Tendo in Ranma, Kikyo in InuYasha, Minami Asakura in Touch and Jean Roque Raltique in Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water come from the same period and the same instinct for characters holding something back.

She has kept working without a visible gap for close to forty years, which in this industry is rarer than any single famous role.

The recent credits run from Yuki Tsukumo in Jujutsu Kaisen to the narrator of Komi Can't Communicate and the voice of the Sibyl System in Psycho-Pass, a machine that sounds unnervingly like a reasonable person. She also dubs Jayma Mays into Japanese, in Glee and the Smurfs films.