Riko Sakaguchi

Riko Sakaguchi (坂口理子; born 16 May 1972) is a Japanese screenwriter and playwright, and the writer of Cherry Magic! THE MOVIE (2022). She had no involvement in the 2020 television series, which was written by Erika Yoshida and Satoko Okazaki, the film brought in a new writer, and that change of hand is a real fact about the production rather than a bookkeeping detail.

Sakaguchi was born in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture. She attended Tokyo Metropolitan Hachioji Higashi High School and read drama in the First Faculty of Letters at Waseda University. She worked at NHK Enterprises before leaving in 2000 to study screenwriting at the Scenario Center in Tokyo, and has been a freelance writer for television, film and theatre since.

Her breakthrough came through competition. In 2006 she took an excellence prize at Asahi Broadcasting’s 21st Century New Scenario Award for Yoi Otoshi wo, and in the same year won the Grand Prize at the 31st Creative Television Drama Award for Oshasha no Shan!, which NHK then produced. A second-place WOWOW Scenario Award followed in 2008 for Freude!.

Her best-known screen credit is The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (かぐや姫の物語, 2013), Studio Ghibli’s final Isao Takahata feature, which she co-wrote with the director. She also co-wrote Studio Ponoc’s Mary and the Witch’s Flower (2017). Her other films include Little Maestra (2012), After the Rain (恋は雨上がりのように, 2018), Kono Michi (2019), Fortuna’s Eye (2019), the paired science-fiction features Boku ga Aishita Subete no Kimi e and Kimi wo Aishita Hitori no Boku e (both 2022), and Father of the Milky Way Railroad (銀河鉄道の父, 2023). For television she wrote the NHK morning serials Massan (2014) and Beppin-san (2016 to 2017), and the children’s legal series Mukashibanashi Houtei (2017 to 2018).

She works in theatre alongside screen writing, founding the unit Tetrachromat in 2012 and the experimental company Project Mirai-ken (Project未來圏) in 2023, which stages work pairing young aspiring actors with established professionals. Her recent credits extend to the stage musical adaptation of Itaewon Class (2025) and the ice show Hyoen 2024.