Goodbye, Inoue Hana

I’m a seiyuu fanboy, and I know most voice actors don’t have it easy — plenty of them can’t make a living off it. But my working assumption has always been that voice acting is a job where, even if the pay is bad, most people keep the title for life.

Meaning: you might stop wanting to do it, you might take fewer gigs, but you don’t just come out and declare you’re quitting forever. Even when it happens, it’s rare.

And yet here we are with a retirement, and from a CV I actually remember: Shimura Yumi (志村由美).

In visual novels she’s better known as Inoue Hana (井ノ上花).

Let me run down the roles I remember:

Your Diary - Yua

My strongest impression of her. Maybe the script deserves some credit, but her performance carries a lot of it — the way she reads all those onomatopoeia lines gives you a perfectly innocent little girl.

Pure X Connect - Shinozaki Ayumi

One of the go-to caring little sister characters. Most of the sisters I’ve seen lean toward the shameless type, and genuinely sweet ones are rare, so this one stuck with me hard.

LoveRec. - Yoshinaga Chiho

Not a main heroine, not on the main plot, and her route has nothing special going on, but… this character is useful. Let me say it again. Use! Ful! I used her! Several times!

Amatsutsumi＊Air no Otome? — Francesca Paramidi

Another side character, this one on the shameless track. Her lines are god-tier — she doesn’t say much, but she leaves a mark.

Koiken Otome - Kamishiro Touko

The last game I played as a tribute to her, and she gets surprisingly few lines. Her character is the aloof type by design, but even aloof, the tone stays sweet.

A more famous role is probably Sion in eden*, but I said after that that I’d cut my dick off if I ever played another minori game, so I never played it.

Shimura Yumi’s voice isn’t especially versatile. It’s sweet by nature, instantly recognizable, and the range she gets out of it is narrow — mostly shifts in tone and speaking speed. That said, her acting is genuinely good. The aloof princess, the shameless pervert, the innocent little girl, the pure-hearted junior sister, the slightly lewd older sister — she makes all of them come alive. I’ll recommend the 3D audio drama from the LoveRec. first-press bonus, recorded by Shimura Yumi. The practicality… I mean the immersion is absolutely amazing.

On her blog, Shimura Yumi closed out with four posts she called very long, looking back on her voice acting career. (Honestly they’re not long at all, I mean, compared to what I write.) The first covers her childhood and high school graduation, when someone told her she had a nice voice, so she thought about going into voice acting and started training. The second is about joining her first agency and her feelings when she landed her first role, Hasegawa Chisame in Negima. The third looks back on all the years and all the characters she’s played, says she loves them all, and calls voice acting a good profession. I assume that’s politeness — and there are plenty of eroge and hentai anime roles she can’t exactly bring up, while her all-ages work is painfully thin. Then the fourth: the actual announcement that she’s ending her voice acting career. It feels abrupt after the previous post, but in the end she says she’s stopping voice work.

I wonder if she got married. Shimura Yumi is 33 now, and marrying and settling down might honestly be the better outcome. Not everyone pulls a Sendai Eri and keeps bouncing around dropping her dignity after getting hitched…

Some voices you only appreciate once they’re gone. This year’s lineup has me, as a seiyuu fanboy, pretty unsatisfied… I was about ready to settle for Fujisaki Usa, and now Inoue Hana is gone too. Guess I’ll be digging through newcomers from here on, though a lot of them feel way short of the mark.

Anyway, I hope Shimura Yumi does well from here on. She doesn’t have a Twitter, so I can’t @ her with a blessing.

Goodbye, Shimura Yumi. Goodbye, Inoue Hana.