Miki Higashino was born on January 1, 1965, in Toyonaka, Osaka. She began studying piano, solfège, and ear training in kindergarten. By the time she entered university to study composition, she had spent her entire life inside music — classical training, theory, the mechanics of how sound worked. She had never touched a video game.
In 1983, during her first year at music university, she saw a notice on the student job board. A company called Konami was looking for someone to compose music. The job posting said nothing about games. She applied because she needed part-time work and because the hours fit her class schedule. She got the job.
When she arrived at the studio, she learned what the job actually was: writing music for arcade machines. She did not know what arcade games sounded like. She had never played one. The engineers showed her the hardware — sound chips with strict limits on how many notes could play at once, how many channels were available, what frequencies the machine could produce. She had been trained to write for orchestras and pianos. This was something else.
Her first major work was the soundtrack for Gradius in 1985, composed in collaboration with the Konami Kukeiha Club. The sound chip could handle only a few voices at a time. Every note had to justify its place. There was no room for decoration. She later said she had stumbled into the job and ended up enjoying it so much that she made game composition her career — but at the time, she was simply solving the problem in front of her with the tools she had been given.
When Konami offered her a full-time position after graduation, she turned it down. She wanted to see the world outside music studios and sound chips. She joined Recruit, worked as an office employee for a time, and then returned to Konami through the company's mid-career hiring program. She came back because the work had stayed in her mind.
In 1995, she composed the soundtrack for Suikoden. For the first time, she was working with CD-quality audio instead of arcade hardware. The technical ceiling had lifted. She could write with the freedom she had been trained for. The result was a 105-track effort for Suikoden II in 1998, of which she composed 97 tracks herself — Keiko Fukami wrote seven, and Tappy Iwase contributed one. It remains one of the most discussed RPG soundtracks of its generation.
Around 2000, she left Konami on maternity leave. She tried to balance composition work with raising a child, but the balance did not hold. She sold her equipment and stepped away from music to focus on her family. She stayed away for years. In 2024, she returned to composition for a game called Bounty Sisters.
Her career is a story of a person who entered a field by accident, left it by choice, and returned on her own terms. She never played the games she composed for. She built the soundscapes without ever walking through them as a player. And the music worked anyway — not because she understood games, but because she understood sound.
The path she took was not straight. She walked away from security twice — once to work at Recruit, once to raise a child. Both times, the door back was not guaranteed. The question her career asks is this: when the work you stumbled into becomes the work you cannot leave behind, how do you know it was meant for you all along — and what are you willing to give up to find out?