Ayako Shirasaki (白崎彩子) was born on September 16, 1969 in Setagaya, Tokyo. She started classical piano lessons at five, and her father, who played jazz trumpet, brought her into jazz around the age of ten, starting her on transcriptions of Bud Powell solos. According to her English-language Wikipedia entry she was already working at twelve, in her family's band at a Tokyo jazz club called J. She went to the Tokyo Metropolitan High School of the Arts and then studied piano at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, and her own biography describes a string of Japanese contest results and radio appearances before she left: a grand prize at the Asakusa Jazz Contest, a spot as the youngest pianist yet heard on NHK-FM's Session, and a residency of about two and a half years at a Shinjuku club. In 1995 she took second place in the piano division of the first Heineken Jazz Competition in Japan; the judge Ray Bryant praised her playing.

In 1997 she moved to New York to study at the Manhattan School of Music, where her teachers included Kenny Barron on piano, Ted Rosenthal on improvisation and Mike Abene on composition. She completed a master's degree in jazz piano there in 2001. She married a fellow student, the guitarist Tom Landman, and they raised two children in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Her first records were made in those student years. She played piano on trumpeter Rich Willey's quintet album Gone With The Piggies (Consolidated Artists Productions, 2001), with Tim Collins on drums, and she is the pianist on Collins's graduation recital Live In Concert, taped at the school on March 24, 2002 and issued in 2003 under the name of The Tim Collins Quartet, with Obed Calvaire on drums. In October 2003 she was one of two pianists on the New York sessions for the Japanese singer Michiko Suzuki's Sweet & Bitter, a date that also featured the tenor saxophonist Frank Wess.

Her debut as a leader came in two stages. The self-produced Live in New York (2002) is listed in her biography, and Existence (What'sNew Records, August 2003) was her first release for a label: a trio session with the drummer Lewis Nash and the bassist Marco Panascia, with "Airegin," "Lennie's Pennies" and "Embraceable You" alongside her own "Far Away" and "Falling Leaves." What'sNew, a Japanese independent label, also released Musically Yours (June 2005), a trio album with the bassist Matt Clohesy and the drummer Shinnosuke Takahashi, and the solo piano album Home Alone (April 2006). Between 2004 and 2006 she was a finalist in the Great American Jazz Piano Competition in Jacksonville, Florida, and she reached the finals of the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Piano Competition at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 2005. In 2006 she appeared on the NPR radio series Piano Jazz, hosted by Marian McPartland; the episode was recorded early that year and broadcast in the fall, and she played two of her own pieces, "Far Away" and "Falling Leaves," alongside "Con Alma," Bud Powell's "Oblivion" and Ellington and Strayhorn's "Isfahan." She is also listed among the artists on NPR's Jazz Christmas compilations of 2006.

After her children were born she returned to a busy schedule in Germany and began recording for the Hamburg-based label Jan Matthies Records. She was one of three pianists, with Mathias Claus and Bob Albanese, at the first International Jazz Solo Piano Festival in 2009, which played Hamburg, Munich and Berlin; the Berlin Konzerthaus concert of March 28, 2009 was issued as Best of 1st International Jazz Solo Piano Festival 2009 (Jan Matthies Records), with liner notes by Howard Mandel. Her solo recital from the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg became Falling Leaves: Live in Hamburg (Jan Matthies Records, 2010), a fifteen-track set of standards, Japanese folk melodies and her own title tune. The album drew reviews in JazzTimes, JazzWax, Cadence, Jersey Jazz, Jazzthetik and other magazines, and she performed at the Jazz Journalists Association Awards gala in 2010. That year she also co-founded the Sakura Music School in New York, which offered private piano lessons and Japanese-language music classes for small children. In 2011 she played the Lucerne festival in Switzerland. Her own account of that visit, which is the only source for it, is that the pianist Maurizio Pollini asked her to play "Sophisticated Lady" and praised her quick fingers afterwards.

The trio album Some Other Time (Jan Matthies Records, JMR 201301) was recorded on May 10, 2013 in New York with the bassist Noriko Ueda and the drummer Quincy Davis and released that August. It opens with two of her own pieces, "Sunrise" and "3 Steps Forward," and includes a solo "Sophisticated Lady." Dan Bilawsky of All About Jazz singled out its reading of Sonny Rollins's "Oleo," and Jeff Winbush, also writing for All About Jazz, called it one of the most enjoyable albums of its year. Her first European trio tour followed in 2015, taking in Germany, Austria and Croatia. In New York she played regularly at Jazz at Kitano, the Blue Note, Smalls and Dizzy's Club, toured Japan in 2004, 2005, 2010, 2013 and August 2019, and was a fixture for about ten years of Bryant Park's Piano in the Park series, where she appeared as late as 2021. She also played piano on two tracks of the violinist Machiko Ozawa's tango album Mi Obliviion (Composers Concordance Records, 2017), alongside Alon Yavnai and two other pianists.

She passed away on November 29, 2021 at her home in New York City, aged 52. The news agency Jiji Press reported the death, gave cancer as the cause, and named her husband Tom Landman as chief mourner; the New Jersey Jazz Society later wrote that she had been ill with cancer for about a year and a half. Other obituaries are in the weekly NY Seikatsu and on the Body & Soul jazz club's site in Tokyo. (Discogs gives the date as November 28; Jiji Press, Wikidata and the Library of Congress authority record give November 29.) Bryant Park held a first tribute concert in spring 2022 and a second celebration of her life and music on October 2, 2023, where Ted Rosenthal, Noriko Ueda and the drummer Jay Sawyer played her tune "Three Steps Forward" along with Bud Powell and Bill Evans pieces.

Shirasaki was a bebop-rooted mainstream pianist, and Rosenthal, her teacher, said as much at the 2023 tribute. The early transcriptions of Bud Powell show in her choice of material: Powell's "Oblivion" on Piano Jazz, "In Walked Bud" on Home Alone, and a repertoire built around bebop and hard-swinging standards such as Sonny Rollins's "Airegin" and "Oleo," Dizzy Gillespie's "Con Alma," Lennie Tristano's "Lennie's Pennies" and Chick Corea's "Mirror Mirror." She balanced that with ballads and film or Broadway material ("Someday My Prince Will Come," "Lush Life," "Here's That Rainy Day"), with Ellington, and with Japanese folk melodies ("Sakura Sakura" on Falling Leaves, "Antagata Dokosa" on Some Other Time).

Her classical training is audible in the touch. Reviewers kept coming back to her clarity, speed and delicacy, and the writer Marc Myers described her as a delicate dynamo of poetic energy and taste. Her records are either unaccompanied piano (Home Alone, Falling Leaves) or piano, bass and drums, and the originals she placed on them include "Far Away," "Falling Leaves," "Sunrise" and "3 Steps Forward." Discogs classes all of her leader albums as jazz, and nothing in her career points to a competing identity; her second profession was teaching young children music.