Satsuki Nakayama

Satsuki Nakayama (Japanese: 中山咲月, born 17 September 1998) is a Japanese model and actor from Tokyo, signed to Ten Carat and its Plume modelling division. He is one of the more visible figures to have come out of Japan’s genderless fashion scene, and he has built an acting career with an unusually high concentration of Boys’ Love work.

He started as a model at twelve. In 2011 he won the Grand Prix at the nineteenth audition held by the teen magazine Pichi Lemon and became one of its exclusive models, known to readers as Sakki. He took his first cover in the July 2014 issue and graduated from the magazine with the April 2015 issue. Around this time he began dressing androgynously after seeing photographs of the Korean model Kaito, and became an influential name in Japan’s genderless fashion subculture. He appeared on NHK Educational’s science variety show Suiensaa as one of its Suiensaa Girls between 2012 and 2015, and was chosen in 2013 to sing on the programme’s new closing theme.

His acting debut came in October 2018 in the TBS serial Chugakusei Nikki, where he played the bartender Aoyama Sarasa, and his first film was Nunuko no Seisen: Harajuku Story (2018) as Kubo Akihisa, frontman of a fictional band. In 2019 he appeared in the Y!mobile web series Parallel School Days as Kaoru, which later received a theatrical release. In 2020 he joined Kamen Rider Zero-One from episode eighteen to the finale as Naki, a member of MetsubouJinrai.net who later becomes Kamen Rider Naki, and whom the producer Takahito Omori confirmed to be genderless. He returned to the role in the film Kamen Rider Zero-One REAL x TIME and the spin-off Project Thouser. The same year he played Nishina Shima in Shochiku’s Kiss Him, Not Me.

Since then a large share of his work has been queer or BL. He played Sasaki Mugi in the MBS Boys’ Love series Mr. Unlucky Has No Choice but to Kiss! (2022), and Takabayashi Izumi in the 2023 Takumi-kun Series film The Morning a Long, Long Story Began. He has also worked steadily on stage: the lead in Haru Sugite, Altair (2018), Fowler in Another Country (2022), the lead in Nanda Koitsu (2023), Takaihito in the stage version of My Happy Marriage (2023), Nagai in the musical Kami ga Boku wo Tsukuru Toki (2024), Jaibo in Litchi Hikari Club (2025) and Kannazuki Ai in the King of Prism stage tour in 2026. His other screen credits include Saitama no Host (TBS, 2023) and Toho’s Touken Ranbu: The Movie – Reimei (2023).

He plays Minato Wataya in Cherry Magic The Musical, the 2025 stage adaptation that ran at TOKYO DOME CITY HALL and Aiplaza Toyohashi. That production is catalogued here at WP 1643.

Nakayama came out as non-binary in 2019 and as a transgender man in August 2021, and has spoken about both publicly. He describes himself as a longtime fujoshi and BL reader who used to cosplay, and has continued to take Boys’ Love roles since transitioning. He also runs his own fashion line, Xspada, founded in 2019, and is a brand ambassador for the unisex label BLAKICHY.