Keiko Ichiguchi was born in Osaka, Japan in 1966. As a young girl, she already had a passion for manga, especially those by Takashina Ryouko and more generally shojo manga. As a teenager, she wrote and illustrated stories for fanzines and, while in high school, she travelled all over Japan to attend amateur manga fairs and show her own creations. It was at that time that she started wanting to turn her passion into a job.
In 1988 she entered the prestigious contest organized by the Shogakukan publishing company and was awarded the first prize in the “Beginners” category. She paid for her college studies with the prize money and travelled to Italy (she graduated in Italian from the Osaka foreign languages university). Once recognized for her talent she kept drawing under the pen name Keiko Sakisaka and started working for Shogakukan; various stories she produced were first published in the magazine “Bessatsu Shojo Comic” and then compiled in small monographic volumes. At the same time she wrote stories for the radio and that led to a travel column in the young girls’ magazine “Palet”.
Then in 1993 she moved to Bologna where she started working with Kappa editions. Her first work published in Italy is called Au-delà de la Porte. Andrea Baricordi, Massimiliano De Giovanni and Barbara Rossi cooperated in its development. In 1997 Keiko Ichiguchi started working for the Japanese company, Kodansha, that published 1945 and America.