#3 – Asai Kiyomi

Kiyomi first debuted in Recca no Honoo back in 1997 and has worked steadily since without ever making it ‘big’. She mostly voices cool, tsundere types and young boys; some of her more well-known roles include her most popular character Ayu in the Kimi ga Nozomu Eien game/anime series, cyborg Miyu in the Mai-HiME franchise and July in the Darker than Black series. She also voiced Hyuuga Hanabi in Naruto, Lilynette Gingerback in Bleach and Kio in Xam’d.

Even though Kiyomi’s work in anime is limited to bit-parts, she has a considerable number of fans thanks to her association with the Kiminozo franchise as well as for the considerable amount of work she has done in eroge, usually using pseudonyms (such as 大花どん). She is apparently a real-life tsundere and loves playing dungeon crawler games and slot machines. She also frequently lamented about not being able to get married and the fact that in her mid-30s, she was still living with her family, who run a rice business…but!!

In November 2011, Kiyomi announced on her Twitter that she had gotten married. Surprisingly, even though she has not appeared in any anime since then, she still continues to do eroge voice work.

Followers will note that she mostly tweets about her husband and married life these days. When she celebrated her 40th birthday in April this year, she tweeted ‘(I who) had given up on marriage when I was in my mid-thirties, yet met my ideal man and even married him! My 30s turned out to be totally awesome! Today I enter my 40s! I’ll make it so that I can say my 40s were totally awesome(* ^ ^ *)”.

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