Saki (サキ; born October 4, 1990) is a Japanese heavy metal musician and songwriter, best known as guitarist of the band Mary's Blood from 2012 until their hiatus in 2022. She is currently active as a solo artist, as one-half of the duo Amahiru with Frédéric Leclercq, and in the rock band Like-an-Angel. Before making her professional debut as part of the short-lived rock trio Mixx in 2010, Saki was briefly a member of the pioneering all-female metal band Destrose, and was later a member of Nemophila from 2019 to 2024. She has been sponsored by Killer Guitars since she was a teenager, and often uses custom-made Fascist models. In 2021, they released her signature model, the seven-string KG-Fascinator Seven the Empress.
Saki was born on October 4, 1990, in the suburbs of Tokyo. Although her family lived in Kobe for a time due to her father's work, she was too young to remember it. Saki has a younger brother, three years her junior, who designs some of her merchandise. Her mother died in an accident when she was six years old. Saki started playing piano in elementary school, but hated it because of the strict teachers. However, she continued the lessons for four or five years, learning how to read music, but says she has not touched the instrument since. Her father listened to Western music of the 1970s and 1980s, but she did not fall in love with it herself until junior high, when she started playing classical guitar. Although she had played trumpet as a member of the brass band since third grade, a female friend asked her to join the classical guitar club in the first year of junior high. There she played music by Southern All Stars, Spitz and the Beatles and developed her love of Western rock and pop music. She quit the brass band the following year, but stayed in her schools' guitar clubs until her third year of high school.
Brian May was the first guitarist Saki became a fan of and Queen + Paul Rodgers were the first musicians she ever saw live in her third year of junior high. She then worked backwards, listening to Rodgers' former bands Free and Bad Company. Her brother's love of professional wrestling also furthered her interest in Western rock and heavy metal, as the WWE often featured songs by acts such as Motörhead, Marilyn Manson, Metallica and Fozzy. She also started reading Young Guitar Magazine at this time, which included coverage of bands such as Bullet for My Valentine and Trivium. Saki said her inspiration to become a musician was seeing footage of Seikima-II's 2005 reunion on NHK and wanting to be their guitarist Jail O'Hashi. She received her first electric guitar and a small amplifier from the father of one of her brother's classmates. Three of the band's guitarists, O'Hashi, Ace Shimizu and Luke Takamura, had released instructional DVDs, so she bought them all and spent her summer vacation before high school practicing.
In high school, Saki was in a four-piece cover band named Kathy & Carol (キャシー＆キャロル), with whom she had her first live performance competing in a contest judged by Face to Ace, a duo featuring Shimizu. She attended weekly guitar classes put on by the Yamaha Corporation, where she learned things such as pentatonic scales. Also in high school, she performed with Rolly at an acoustic guitar seminar he held. In April 2009, Saki began attending her father's alma mater, Keio University. She majored in aesthetics and art history at its Faculty of Letters. She ended up having to repeat her senior year, eventually graduating in spring 2014. Towards the end of her first year there, Saki was invited to join the heavy metal band Destrose as a support guitarist via Mixi. It was her first band that played original material and is where she first began using the stage name "SAKI". She also had her first recording session with them, but said it was only a guitar solo. Saki estimated she was a member of the pioneering all-female metal band for only 10 months.
Mixx and Mary's Blood: 2010–2022
Saki made her professional debut in July 2010 as a member of the all-female rock trio Mixx alongside vocalist Asuka and drummer Jackson. She explained that it was formed by an agency with the concept of featuring girls in maid outfits. Record label Exellex released their first two singles, "Agepoyo Let's Go!" and "Bye 3", on October 13 and the band played their first concert on October 29. "Agepoyo Let's Go!" is the first song Saki wrote that was commercially released; she wrote it in less than five days in order to compete for a television tie-up opportunity, which it won. A third single, "Heavy Metal Sweets", was released on January 12, 2011. Some of their songs were composed by Kiyoshi of hide with Spread Beaver. Saki participated in the Muon no Yaon charity event hosted by Show-Ya on May 7, 2011. Admission was free but donations were encouraged to aid recovery from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which is the reason the concert used as little electricity as possible. Mixx disbanded in May 2011, before the June 8 release of their fourth single "Lil' Devil's Lullaby" and August 10 release of their self-titled album. In August 2011, Saki formed an all-female band named Re:Maker. When the vocalist left, leaving a trio of Saki, bassist Fin and drummer Anri, they decided to utilize the Vocaloid voice-synthesizing software. Re:Maker released the mini-album Neo-Invasion on August 25, 2012. Saki later credited intrigue around Vocaloid at the time as being the reason they were able to appear on television and perform in South Korea, the latter marking her first international performance. Re:Maker went on hiatus in June 2013, as the members became busy with other projects.
In July 2012, Saki joined the all-female heavy metal band Mary's Blood. It had been formed two and a half years prior by her predecessors in Destrose, before they asked her to audition when their guitarists were leaving. She went on to become the main composer of songs in the band. Mary's Blood performed their first international show in Houston, Texas at Anime Matsuri 2013, and then signed to major record label Nippon Columbia for the release of their first album Countdown to Evolution on August 20, 2014. Readers of heavy metal magazine Burrn! voted Mary's Blood second place in its best new artist category. The band switched to Victor Entertainment for their second album, Bloody Palace on October 7, 2015. Mary's Blood switched labels again for their fourth album Revenant, released on April 18, 2018 by Tokuma Japan Communications. Around this time, Saki was involved in an unspecified criminal act and the subsequent trouble related to it took a toll on her mental state. At the same time, disagreements in musical direction appeared in the band, which furthered her mental exhaustion to the point she told their management agency that she could not continue in the summer of 2018. The agency accommodated her, which included talks of a project that would later lead to the formation of Nemophila, and Saki said this alleviated some of her mental stress and allowed her to continue in Mary's Blood.
While working on the band's June 12, 2019 album Confessions, Saki experienced a disconnect between what the other members wanted to do and what she felt was best for the band, and considered quitting. This resulted in her composing only three songs for the album. Around the time Mary's Blood were live-streaming concerts without an audience in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan, the band members discussed leaving their agency due to a strained-relationship with the company, but, because they did not want to manage everything themselves again, they instead decided to take a break. In her autobiography, Saki wrote that some members wanted to continue, but others did not. Although she personally felt they should disband since there were no plans to resume activities in the near future, she understood the sentiment that it was "important that the band's name lives on", thus they chose to go on hiatus. After touring to support their self-titled sixth studio album, which was released on September 29, 2021, Mary's Blood began the indefinite hiatus on April 9, 2022.