Motoko Takahashi

Motoko Takahashi (Japanese: 髙橋幹子) is a Japanese screenwriter and novelist. She came to writing late and from outside the industry, and the route she took there is unusual enough to be worth telling.

She is from the town of Iide in Yamagata Prefecture. After graduating from a junior college in Hokkaido she went home and took a job at the local agricultural cooperative. She was twenty-eight when she moved to Tokyo, where she held down a company job while studying screenwriting in the evenings at the Scenario Center. At thirty-three she won the Grand Prize at the 20th Fuji TV Young Scenario Award, chosen out of 1,312 entries. In the same period she also took the top prize in NHK Nara’s open screenplay competition for its Manyo Love Story strand, from 572 submissions, and that script, Tasokare kara no Tegami, was broadcast on 19 September 2008. Her professional debut proper came at the end of that year with the Fuji TV drama Senshi no Shikaku, aired 29 December 2008. Since November 2023 she has been represented by the screenwriting agency Queen-B.

Her television work runs across networks and registers. She wrote for Tsukino Koibito: Moon Lovers (Fuji TV, 2010) and Higashino Keigo Mysteries (2012) as a co-writer, then took sole screenplay credits on Otoriyose Ouji Iida Yoshimi (Nagoya TV, 2013), Tenchu: Yami no Shiokinin (Fuji TV, 2014), Kiseki Through (NTV, 2015) and Kuzu no Honkai (Fuji TV, 2017). Her recent run has been busy: Uri wo Haru (TBS, 2024), Sugar Sugar Honey (TOKYO MX, 2024), Business Kon (MBS, 2024), Sugar Dog Life (ABC and TV Asahi, 2024), Aijin Tensei (MBS, 2024), Renai Kakumei (ABC, 2025) and Deep Revenge (Yomiuri TV, 2026).

In animation she has been a regular staff writer on Chibi Maruko-chan (Fuji TV) since 2012 and on Ojarumaru (NHK Educational) since 2015, and has written for Meiji Tokyo Renka (2019), Love All Play (2022) and Blue Orchestra (2023). Away from the screen she published a run of short romance collections with Taibundo in 2013 and 2014, created the manga Tokyo Share Story (drawn by Rieko Tada, serialised in Monthly Comic Zenon), wrote the serialised novel Chain World in 2015, and has contributed an essay column to the Yamagata Shimbun since 2016.

For Hold on, Harutora-kun (ちょっと待とうよ、春虎くん, MBS, 2026) she shares the screenplay credit with Ryuji Yoshizaki and is credited on the opening episode.