Rita

**Rita** (理多), real name **Riko Hirai** (平井 理子), is a japanese Osakan singer, lyricist and voice actress. She is from Suite city of the Osaka perfecture in Japan. She uses **Rita** (stylised with roman letters) for her singing career, while **理多**(also read Rita) is used for her voice acting work. She is a prominent voice in the adult game industry, being active from 2002 onwards. Her age is disclosed, but her birthday is recorded at March 25th and she is 151 cm tall.

## Bio

Her stage name is taken from the name of a character from a work in progress game a friend of hers was making. The game wasn't completed, but a promotion movie was made. She didn't pick a surname, but didn't mind since she disliked being called by her surname ever since she was a child. She had to repurpose the name for kanji though, to make her audition processes easier.

In 2001, she was giving out leaflets at Hiromi Satou's first concert in Osaka, and after that she was attracted to singing and performance. After that, she learned of the PC game communities and their music, for which she auditioned six months later to land her first role as Aya Tsukishiro in minori's "Wind - a breath of heart-". At the same time, she also played Kusanagi is Tamasoft's Sekai no Zente, playing a completely different character. She displayed a wide range of character voices, from energetic girls to young boys, adult women and butch females.

As a singer, her unique wide deep mid-low range and husky voice and the ability to change her voice depending on the style is noteworthy. According to her tweets, her voice used to be on a soprano range when she was in high school, but repeated inflammation of her vocal cords gave her her unique husky sound. After highschool, she finished her studies to receive an elementary school teacher license.

She self-proclaimed to be extremely unlucky. During live shows, she often uses rapidfire speech and funny accents to break the ice between the audience and co-stars, often leading to a lot of laughter. She is labelled as an "entertainer" by her fans and colleagues and in all her web radio guest appearances she speaks so much that they usually go overtime.

## In Papillon Rose

Rita contributed to the original Papillon Rose website after responding to the audition call for singers in the Osaka perfecture. She landed as part of the trio "Bouquet du Rose" under the alias **Mahiru Sonoda**, performing "Everlasting Love" as their first song. Her first solo song on the website was the insert song "Crazy for you". Other contributions include the lyrics to "Rosetta" (the opening theme of the first season), as well as "Renaissance" and "Bara no Priere" (the R season Opening and Ending themes). In the OVA she also performed a solo version of "Everlasting Love", which was used as an insert song. By "R" season and the OVA onward, she also used the alias **Hikari Nakayama** for her singing performance, previously using it only for the lyric work of "Rosetta".

## Trivia

* She was a frequent collaborator with Kuri-Zill, providing lyrics and vocals for her freelance produced songs. One of their most famous collabs, unrelated to Papillon Rose, was a song named "Keep loving you" (published under her Hikari Nakayama alias), which was the unofficial anthem of the 2ch anime forums.
* Her identity and the double alias remained mostly uncorfirmed until 2023, when Kuri-Zill uploaded a remastered version of "Keep loving you", confirming that she was the original singer.