Erika Yoshida

Erika Yoshida (吉田恵里香; born 21 November 1987) is a Japanese screenwriter and novelist, and the lead writer of TV Tokyo’s Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?! (2020). She is the most decorated writer among the Cherry Magic crew and one of the most prominent screenwriters working in Japan today.

Yoshida was born in Kanagawa Prefecture. She attended the Nihon University junior and senior high school and went on to the Department of Literary Arts in Nihon University’s College of Art, joining her agency, Queen-B, while still a student. She writes across television drama, film, anime and stage, handling both original stories and adaptations, and has also published prose fiction.

Her television credits include Hana Nochi Hare (2018), Heaven? (2019), DASADA (2020), Cherry Magic (2020), Kimi no Hana ni Naru (2022) and the NHK drama Seiri no Ojisan to Sono Musume (2023). In film she has written Sensei Kun Master (2018), xxxHOLiC (2022) and Otonanajimi (2023). In anime she is best known for the series composition of Bocchi the Rock! (2022) and its 2024 compilation films, and she has also worked on Tower of God (2020) and the original series Maebashi Witches (2025).

Two works define her reputation. The first is Koisenu Futari (恋せぬふたり, NHK, 2022), a drama about an aromantic asexual woman and man who decide to live together. It won her the 40th Mukoda Kuniko Award, one of the highest honours in Japanese television writing; the selection committee praised it for describing its subject “in an extremely subdued voice, yet with a bright tone”. The second is Tora ni Tsubasa (虎に翼, 2024), NHK’s morning serial about Japan’s first female lawyer, which she had long wanted to write and which drew wide attention for its treatment of gender and legal rights. It took a Galaxy Award monthly prize in October 2024.

For a BL and GL readership Yoshida is a notable figure well beyond Cherry Magic: between that series and Koisenu Futari she is one of the few mainstream Japanese screenwriters to have written sympathetically and at length about characters outside the standard romantic script, and to have been given a major award for doing so.