akiko (あきこ), who writes her stage name in lower case, was born on December 14, 1976 in Urawa, a city that is now part of Saitama City. She came to jazz sideways. At 19 she was working in a bar where a guitarist played every night, and when he started "Autumn Leaves" she told him she knew the song; he asked her to sing it, and that was the start of her singing in public. As a teenager she had gone to rock'n'roll and jive DJ nights where the DJs played records of rock'n'roll singers working through standards, which she did not recognise as jazz, and the same guitarist introduced her to real jazz albums. She was paid to sing while still at university and was already working regularly at Tokyo live houses and jazz clubs before she graduated from Chuo University in 1999; she was playing two sets at Alfie in Roppongi when the debut came out.

Her agency passed her demo tape to Universal Music, which sent it on to the international team at Verve. The result was Girl Talk, released in Japan on June 21, 2001, when she was 24: an album of standards recorded in Paris and produced by the French pianist and producer Henri Renaud, with Manuel Rocheman on piano, Sylvain Beuf on tenor saxophone, Michel Zenino on bass and Stéphane Foucher on drums. It is billed as the first album by a Japanese female singer on Verve, and it won the New Star Prize in Swing Journal's 2001 Jazz Disc Awards. That summer she sang the opening theme "Lupin The Third" and the ending theme "What's The Worry?" for the television special Lupin III: Alcatraz Connection with the Yuji Ohno Trio, and the collaboration-and-remix album Upstream followed in November, with a studio version of the Lupin theme on which Ohno plays piano and Akira Okazawa plays electric bass.

The next albums kept moving. Hip Pop Bop (2002) paired her with Corinne Drewery of Swing Out Sister on a duet version of Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Waters of March," released as a single in May 2002, beside a cover of Guns N' Roses' "Paradise City." Akiko's Holiday (February 2003) was recorded in New York as a tribute to Billie Holiday, with Roy Hargrove as guest on trumpet and flugelhorn, Mark Whitfield on guitar, Neal Evans on Hammond organ and the producer Brother Jacques on saxophone and flute. She then worked twice with the DJ and producer Tatsuo Sunaga, on Mood Swings (2003) and Mood Indigo (2004), both issued as hybrid SACDs; Mood Indigo includes a title track, Duke Ellington's tune, produced and arranged by the Italian bandleader and producer Nicola Conte with Fabrizio Bosso on trumpet, Daniele Scannapieco on tenor saxophone and Pietro Lussu on piano, alongside tracks arranged by the pianist Hajime Yoshizawa and Yuri Dazai. Off record, she hosted TOKYO FM's JAZZ in TOKYO from 2001 to 2004 and CROSS FM's akiko da joe in 2002 and 2003, was a spokeswoman for Estee Lauder in 2003 and 2004, and played the Taichung Jazz Festival in Taiwan in 2004.

Simply Blue (June 2005) was produced by akiko herself, with Yoshio Suzuki on bass, Tadataka Unno on piano and Tommy Campbell on drums. Little Miss Jazz & Jive Goes Around The World! (November 2005), produced by Yasuharu Konishi, turned to jump and jive, and its "Around the World" became a Clarion commercial in 2006. Collage (April 2006) collected her first five years, and Vida (April 2007) was a set of Brazilian songs recorded in Rio de Janeiro that includes a duet with Arto Lindsay; its "Batucada" was used as the theme of Nippon Television's 2007 South American football coverage. She played the Fuji Rock Festival that July and released albums in Korea. A White Album (November 2007) is a Christmas record arranged by Konishi with Kiyoshi Sugimoto on guitar.

In 2008 she produced the two-part What's Jazz?, issued as Style in October and Spirit in November, each with a DVD in its limited edition, with the pianist Satoru Shionoya, the bassist Yosuke Inoue and the violinist Asuka Kaneko among the players on Style. Hit Parade (2009) was a jazz-vocal tribute to the London Nite club night, reworking songs from the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" to the Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go" and Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," and she sang at the first Billboard Japan Music Awards ceremony that year. Words (December 2009) was produced and arranged by the Norwegian keyboardist Bugge Wesseltoft, who also plays on it, and mixes poetry readings with songs, among them John Coltrane's "Naima."

From 2011 her albums appeared on Ability Muse Records. Across the Universe (2011) is a Beatles album, and its title song was used in a Mitsui Fudosan Residential advertisement. Swingy, Swingy (May 2012), billed with the vocal duo Chai-Chii Sisters, and Dark Eyes (August 2012), recorded in New Orleans, brought her back to swing and doo-wop and included some standards sung in Japanese. Jazz Me NY (2014) and Rockin' Jivin' Swingin' (2015) followed, and a fifteenth-anniversary best-of, Elemental Harmony, appeared in June 2016. From 2012 she toured Europe often, including Denmark and Poland (the Jazz Na Buduku festival) in 2012, Poland and Slovakia in 2014, a Kumamoto earthquake benefit concert in Berlin in 2016 and the Peperonchino Jazz Festival in Italy that summer. Her first book, Jazz o Yomu (ジャズを詠む, DU Books, April 2018), is a set of essays built around 25 jazz standards and how they might shape a life.

Her recent records are varied. Spectrum (2019) was made with the pianist Masaki Hayashi. Ukulele Lady (June 2021) marked her twentieth anniversary and was followed by Ukulele Lady2 (2022), and from September 2021 she released a digital single a month, a run that included remixes and collaborations with Masayasu Tsuboguchi, Yukihiro Fukutomi and Mark de Clive-Lowe. The album Jazz o Yomu (August 2023), recorded with the pianist Tadataka Unno's trio, put standards in the spirit of the book on record. She served as music director of the film Adabana in October 2024, and her album Emptiness Fulfilled (満たされた空虚, Pony Canyon, October 2, 2024) was inspired by it. In 2024 she toured Ireland and Italy, and in 2025 she played Blue Note Beijing and Blue Note Shanghai. In the run-up to her twenty-fifth anniversary she released a digital single each month from June 2025, three 7-inch singles on Record Store Day on April 18, 2026, and the 15-track digital album Revisited! on June 21, 2026. She turns 50 in December.

akiko is first of all an interpreter of the standards, and a restless one. She names Billie Holiday as a favorite, admired for her originality rather than imitated, and a 2001 article compared her phrasing with Holiday's and noted her vibrato and improvised line endings. She says she likes jazz because it has improvisation and a lot of feeling, and she has said the spirit of jazz matters more to her than any one style. She also named punk, Hawaiian guitar, Louis Jordan and the Jackson Five among her listening, and she has sung Minnie Riperton, Stevie Wonder and Peggy Lee in her sets; later conversations added the Beatles, classical and ambient music, Miles Davis, Robert Glasper and Jazzanova, and enka, which she described as Japan's own blues.

That curiosity shows in the records: bossa nova and Brazilian songs on Vida, jump and jive on Little Miss Jazz & Jive, Beatles songs and punk-era new-wave covers, Norwegian electronic jazz on Words, ukulele-and-vocal standards, and a long line of club-jazz collaborations with Tatsuo Sunaga, Hajime Yoshizawa, Yukihiro Fukutomi, Quasimode and Nicola Conte. She writes and arranges many of her own songs and handles art direction on her releases.

Some of this work, such as the Japanese-language pop covers on Ukulele Lady2, sits outside jazz, and she appears in commercials and as a brand ambassador. The jazz identity is nonetheless the dominant one: Discogs tags nearly all her leader albums Jazz, with style tags such as Vocal, Bop, Bossa Nova and Contemporary Jazz, her debut label was Verve, her first prize was a Swing Journal jazz award, and her touring includes jazz festivals and Blue Note clubs.