This page has biographies of each current Kalafina member.
Most information here comes from a few interviews, mostly the ones from Kalafina Record. The rest of it is from Wikipedia and other websites. Profile pictures are from Kalafina's official site.
Click on a name below to jump to that member's biography.
Hikaru Masai
Keiko Kubota
Wakana Ootaki
Hikaru Masai
born 7.2.1987 in Toyama
blood type: O
height: 155cm
favorite animal: butterfly
favorite anime/manga: anything by CLAMP
favorite activity: sleeping
favorite music: Beyonce, Jennifer Lopez, DREAMS COME TRUE
Hikaru was an only child for most of her early years until her little sister was born. She had a different personality as a child and used to be very energetic and careless, but her family moved a lot so she had few friends through her childhood.
Her mother loved music and wanted Hikaru to be a singer. She was so insistent that Hikaru ended up loving singing from when she was very young, without even knowing why. Through her childhood, her mother would practice singing with her and taught her how to sing properly. It was a difficult process, since her mother wouldn't accept anything less than the best, but Hikaru went along with all of it. Currently, she still has a good relationship with her mother.
Because of her mother's pressure and her own love of singing, Hikaru didn't have many adventures as an older child, and she even stopped eating foods that might affect her voice. She auditioned a lot and appeared in over twenty commercials. After graduating high school, she also studied English for a year, to make sure that she'd have something to fall back on in case she couldn't become a singer.
After the year of study, she started auditioning to be a singer. Because she enjoyed singing the main melodies of songs, she mainly focused on being a solo singer, and eventually she was called to audition for Kalafina by someone who had seen one of her previous audition tapes. When SME staff asked if she wanted to take part in singing the Kara no Kyoukai themes, she agreed right away. Oblivious had been already released at that time, but she didn't know Wakana or Keiko yet.
Eventually Hikaru went to record Sprinter and Aria. She was extremely nervous, but since it was her first recording, she considered it a very important experience. She met Wakana and Keiko around that time, and their first collaboration was the music video for Sprinter. Later they performed live as the opening act for Yuki Kajiura's second live tour.
After Seventh Heaven and Lacrimosa were released, Hikaru decided to move to Tokyo with the rest of her family so that she could be a full-time Kalafina member. Before then, she hadn't considered solely working in the group, but changed her mind when Kalafina held their first "greeting" live. But even then, she still didn't fully realize that she'd become a professional singer until Storia was released, and Kalafina became much more important to her.
Going to Anime Boston in 2009 was Hikaru's first trip outside Japan. She's always a very introverted person, and doesn't talk much during interviews or live MCs. However, she's said that without Kalafina, she would probably have no life and never leave her house. She values the group very much and wants to keep being a member even if she also does solo work.
Keiko Kubota
born 5.12.1985 in Tokyo
blood type: ??
height: 155cm
favorite animal: snake
favorite anime/manga: Puella Magi Madoka Magica, One Piece
favorite activity: golf, tennis, exercising
favorite music: Namie Amuro, Yutaka Ozaki, K-Pop
Keiko is the youngest child in her family. As a child she was very mischievous and energetic, and loved playing outside and spending time on her own. Her family wasn't that interested in music and she didn't take any music lessons.
She got interested in singing in middle school. Before then, she'd sung karaoke with friends and even auditioned for Morning Musume, but wasn't particularly interested in getting into show business. However, after singing some Namie Amuro songs, she decided that she wanted to learn singing, acting and dancing, and started taking classes at a production company.
At first, she was aiming at learning all three things, and even inspired the school's dance club herself. Then, in her first year of high school, she heard Yutaka Ozaki's music on the radio and decided that she wanted to sing first and foremost. From then on she focused entirely on singing, practiced a lot, and stopped learning acting or dancing.
After graduating high school, Keiko was hired by Space Craft Productions and began singing in their projects, working in a shop at the same time to help support herself. During that time she met Wakana, as well as Kaori Oda (who'd later become a member of FictionJunction), and Ayaka Ito. However, she still wasn't sure what kind of artist she wanted to be.
A little while later, she formed the group Itokubo with Ayaka Ito. Since it was a small group, they performed live on the street a lot, and Keiko learned most of her live behaviors from having to sing outside to passersby. Itokubo never became more popular, but by the time it was disbanded, she didn't feel particularly regretful either.
Once Itokubo was disbanded, Keiko was approached to join Kalafina. She'd met Yuki Kajiura before while singing the song Kaze no machi e, but didn't think that she would pass the auditions for Kalafina. She passed, however, and started having difficulty with reading the music written for Kalafina and FictionJunction, which was also starting to perform more often then. Because she was working with professionals such as Wakana and Yuriko Kaida, she felt very discouraged.
However, after Kalafina's first "greeting" live, Keiko's opinion toward Kalafina changed and she became very attached to the other two members. In Kalafina, she's mainly the most outgoing and extroverted one, acting as the face of the group. Currently, she isn't thinking about solo work, and is focusing instead of being a Kalafina member as long as possible.
Wakana Ootaki
born 10.12.1984 in Fukuoka
blood type: ??
height: 159cm
favorite animal: shark, dinosaur
favorite anime/manga: anything from Studio Ghibli
favorite activity: cooking
favorite music: MISIA, Gekidan Shiki, Whitney Houston
Wakana was born in Choufu and moved to Fukuoka when she was around five or six. She was loud and unique as a child, and did a lot of different things than the other children, although she made a lot of friends.
She loved singing from her childhood, and originally wanted to be an opera singer. In school she was in the chorus group, but eventually started singing on her own, and chose a lot of difficult songs to boost her self-confidence. When she entered middle school, she started to learn singing more seriously, with a friend of her mother's as her teacher.
By high school, Wakana had become depressed because she wasn't sure of her future plans. Eventually she decided to also attend singing school, and there became more interested in artists like MISIA. During her second year of high school, she decided to drop out. It made conflict between herself and her parents, but she was determined to do it, and ended up quitting.
At 19, after auditioning for SME several times and failing, she was accepted into Space Craft. There, she took voice lessons with Yuuka Nanri, who'd also go on to work with Yuki Kajiura as FictionJunction YUUKA. She also met Keiko and Kaori Oda, and sang for Yuki Kajiura as well. After a while she became very stressed from having to work and perform with Space Craft at the same time.
Eventually Wakana became a member of Kalafina, and became attached to the group right away. However, she struggled tremendously with performing live - which she doesn't like since it makes her very nervous and tired - and considered leaving the group because she felt she wasn't good enough for them. In the summer of 2010 she finally decided to permanently stay with Kalafina.
Wakana sees herself as an extroverted but shy person, who makes up for her shyness by talking a lot. She gets nervous easily and feels challenged by her work in Kalafina, but also thinks those challenges are necessary. Currently, she's focused just on working with Kalafina and finding her own solo voice in the future.
