Megumi Hayashibara/Biography

Hayashibara was born on March 30, 1967 in,. When she was a young girl, Hayashibara loved to watch anime, and was shocked to learn that adults provided the voices of the characters she believed were real. When she was a little older, she was one of eighteen girls out of over 600 chosen by a talent agency, Arts Vision, to undergo training to become a voice actress. Despite her two-year training with Arts Vision, Hayashibara's parents were opposed to her prospective career; bowing to their pressure, she enrolled in nursing school, and disliked it. She eventually saw a magazine article about a voice acting school that was recruiting students, and she made up her mind to quit nursing and become an actress.

Hayashibara's first anime role was that of a kindergartner heard off-screen in the first episode of , and she later was credited as providing the voice for Yosuke Nanao. She then went on to provide hundreds, if not thousands of other voices.

In addition to her voice acting career, Hayashibara is an accomplished singer, with fourteen solo albums released between 1991 and 2004. She also has hosted two radio talk and music shows, Tokyo Boogie Night (in Tokyo) and Megumi's Heartful Station (in Osaka).

On March 30, 1998, on her thirty-first birthday, Hayashibara married a coworker she had been seeing for the past five years. On June 28, 2004, she had her first child, a girl.

She is also the author of the book Jigglypuff's Magic Lullaby.