Hiromi Tsuru

The brake in the Shuto Expressway

Hiromi Tsuru died with his foot on the brake pedal of his car on a Tokyo highway. It was November 16, 2017, and the engine was still running when police found his body. He was 57 years old.

That final gesture of stopping the vehicle before losing consciousness prevented a multi-car pileup on the Shuto Expressway. It was a clean maneuver in the middle of a sudden aortic dissection.

But her real story began much earlier, in the Himawari theater group.

She was trained as a child actress there before the microphone crossed her path for good. In 1978 she landed her first major role in The Story of Perrine (Perrine Monogatari). She wasn't the typical high-pitched, submissive voice studios were looking for at the time. Tsuru had a direct, somewhat hard tone that suited characters who took the lead.

And then 1986 arrived.

That year Dragon Ball premiered in Japan, and her portrayal of Bulma set a standard for personality the genre had never seen. She was more than a traveling companion to the protagonist. She was the engine of the plot and the voice that brought order to a world of martial arts.

The chemistry she built in the studio with Masako Nozawa was the foundation of a production that would last for decades.

The voice that didn't ask for permission

Throughout the 1980s her workload was massive. In 1982 she brought Madoka Ayukawa to life in Kimagure Orange Road and changed what a female co-lead in romantic anime could be. The character was distant and complex, a register Tsuru mastered without apparent effort.

But young audiences would remember her for something completely different.

In 1988 she began working on Soreike! Anpanman, voicing Dokin-chan. It was a working relationship that stayed steady for almost thirty years. Tsuru didn't only pursue big dramatic roles. She understood that Japan's voice acting industry demanded a physical and mental endurance that few could sustain.

In 1989 she joined the cast of Ranma 1/2 to voice Ukyo Kuonji.

There she showed she could handle physical comedy and rapid-fire dialogue with the same precision as moments of tension. Her voice needed no artifice to sound commanding. In 1998 she jumped into video games with Metal Gear Solid, and her role as Naomi Hunter is still a reference point for sound designers today.

Hideo Kojima was looking for a very specific coldness for that character, and he found it in her.

The rigor of the recording studio

Tsuru never wanted to direct or move into permanent producing roles. She preferred the recording booth and a script underlined with technical notes about breathing.

In 2004 she took part in Monster (the adaptation of Naoki Urasawa's manga), playing Eva Heinemann. It was one of her darkest works and furthest from the brightness of her early projects. The psychological complexity she brought to that role showed that her acting maturity was at its peak.

And the gamble paid off.

The Japanese seiyuu industry is merciless as time goes by, but she kept her leading roles without producers ever considering a generational handover. In 2015 she returned to record sessions for Dragon Ball Super with the same energy she had in the 1980s.

Recorded over 800 television episodes across four decades of nonstop work.

In 2018 actress Aya Hisakawa took on the role of Bulma after a casting process that sought to preserve the tonal essence Tsuru had established. The last voice recording of Hiromi Tsuru before her passing was used in the video game World of Final Fantasy for the character Quistis Trepe. Her car was towed off the highway without a single scratch on the bodywork.