Rina Sato -- Meido no Komori Uta（冥途の子守唄）

 

I've been back in the anime-viewing game for about a decade thanks to my friend, and over that time, my impression of the seiyuu who get cast in the various TV shows and movies is that they have to be ready to take on characters of wildly varying vocal pitches: from cute babies to monstrous ogres and everyone in between.

Take for example, veteran seiyuu/singer Rina Sato（佐藤利奈）who's been working for 20 years. I never got into the series "Toaru Kagaku no Railgun"（とある科学の超電磁砲）from more than a decade ago, but she played the main character, Mikoto Misaka（御坂美琴）who has a whole ton of power, speaks like any contemporary high school girl who's a bit of a tomboy, and loves cutesy things.

I think that my first time seeing Sato in action though was through the 2015 food-based anime "Koufuku Graffiti"（幸腹グラフィティ）which I thoroughly loved, and as Machiko Ryo（町子リョウ）, she sounded completely different with a much more feminine timbre to her voice. Also, I did write about a couple of songs from the show, one of which was "Shiawase Graffiti"（しあわせグラフィティ）, an insert tune performed by Sato and her co-star Asuka Ohgame（大亀あすか）that reached meme levels of popularity.

Now, let's come back to 2022. All I can say is that Sato must have needed a lot of that Gollum juice to prevent her larynx from tuckering out after voicing Ranko Mannen（万年嵐子）from the currently playing anime, "Akiba Meido Senso"（アキバ冥途戦争...Akiba Maid War）. A week ago, she was featured pulling off one of the highlights of the anime season as she became a potent one-woman exfiltration team that would have had Josh Brolin's character in "Sicario" going "Hmmmm...". Although it was her fellow seiyuu Minami Tanaka（田中美海）singing "Junjou Maid Bukkoroshi Kiss"（純情メイドぶっころ主KISS）, it was Mannen going all Meiko Kaji（梶芽衣子）on the enemy maids.

This time though, Sato is behind the mike channeling the late Keiko Fuji（藤圭子）and her dusky tones as she sings the ending theme for "Akiba Meido Senso", "Meido no Komori Uta" (A Maid's Lullaby). Songwriter Takeshi Isozaki（磯崎健史）created this with a number of influences in mind. First of all, it starts off with a brass vibrato blast which brings back memories of the theme song from the classic 1973 yakuza film by Kinji Fukusaku（深作欣二）, "Jingi Naki Tatakai"（仁義なき戦い...Battles Without Honor and Humanity）: the theme has since become the fanfare to be played on any Japanese TV show whenever anything to do with Japanese gangsters gets featured. Then, while Sato goes into deep Fuji mode, Isozaki's melody mixes in Fuji's brand of down-in-the-dumps Mood Kayo with some Hollywood film noir gangster jazz that had me thinking of Michael Buble's rendition of "Feeling Good". Just like the depiction of Mannen's massacre in Episode 1, it looks like the songwriter went all out to come up with something faithful for this show of Akiba maids going into organized crime. Mind you, it'll be a few more weeks as of this writing before the theme songs for the show come out on sale.