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.
Early life 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 , 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.
Career 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.
In December 2015, Saki began writing the column for Young Guitar Magazine. The first 102 entries were compiled into the book , which was published on October 6, 2025. Saki played guitar on two songs from Zwei's 2015 album Neo Masque and two songs from Animetal the Second's 2016 album Blizzard of Animetal the Second. She also contributed guitar to the song "Frozen Rose" from the 2017 album Astraia by Yashiro, Mary's Blood's live support guitarist. After taking part in a similar performance at Naon no Yaon 2017, Saki organized the World Guitar Girls Collection project which features several female rock guitarists playing famous songs in instrumental medley format. World Guitar Girls Collection Vol. 0 took place on July 17, 2017 and featured a performance by five guitarists, but was mainly a Mary's Blood and Cyntia concert. Another performance took place at that year's Classic Rock Jam on November 25, but the first standalone World Guitar Girls Collection concert was held on August 19, 2018. Saki also played on three singles by the horror punk idol group XTeen; 2018's "Eclipse" and "Romanticist", and 2019's "The New Black".
Nemophila and Amahiru: 2019–2024 At the beginning of 2019, when Saki was questioning her future in Mary's Blood, their management agency offered her the job of producing a band that featured new female vocalist Mayu for an upcoming event. After several meetings, Saki decided it would be easier for her to join as a full member instead. Drummer Tamu Murata said she decided to join once Saki had, Saki called Hazuki out of the blue when it was decided to have a twin guitar lineup, and Mayu recruited her classmate Haraguchi-san as bassist. After supporting Mayu at an August 2019 live session, the five musicians decided to form a real band as they felt the line-up was too good to be a one-off. Because she was originally approached to be the producer, was the oldest member and the one with the most musical experience, Saki said she said felt pressure and a sense of responsibility to speak up on certain things and ended up having to lead the group. This was the complete opposite of the dynamics in Mary's Blood, and she said she struggled with how to act with her juniors as she tried her hardest to make the band a success.
Nemophila played their first concerts on September 14 and 15 as part of Metal Weekend 2019 at Zepp Diver City, where they opened for Loudness and HammerFall, and released their first single "Oiran" on February 29, 2020. Saki's brother designed the band's mon-like logo based on their namesake flower. "Raitei", their second single, was released on August 22, 2020. Third single "Dissension" followed on February 28, 2021. On June 25, 2021, British record label JPU Records released Oiran - Extended Edition, which compiles the band's entire discography up to that point from the singles sold only via Nemophila's official website and a newly recorded English version of "Dissension". Nemophila released their first album Revive on December 14, 2021. After two further studio albums, Seize the Fate (2022) and Evolve (2024), and a Nippon Budokan concert celebrating their fifth anniversary, it was announced that Saki had left Nemophila on March 31, 2024 due to "differences in direction". In her autobiography, Saki wrote that various circumstances had changed after the band returned from their March 2023 American tour and that she was also experiencing unspecified personal troubles at the time. She wrote that she felt like an outsider due to the age gap between her and the other members, but also that they were now able to continue without her. Although Saki had discussions with the agency to explore various options, both parties eventually agreed to her leaving the band in March 2024.