Fumika Asari (浅利史花) is a jazz guitarist and composer from Fukushima City who has worked in Tokyo since 2012. She plays swinging, blues-tinged mainstream jazz on a vintage Gibson ES-175, has made three albums under her own name for the Tokyo label ReBorn Wood, Introducin' (2020), Thanks For Emily (2023) and Enter A New Phase (2026), and is one of the three guitarists of Generations Guitar Trio, whose self-titled album appeared in 2022. Her year of birth is given as 1993 by both her Japanese Wikipedia entry and the biography written for Ryozen Jazz Festival 2017; her birthday has not been published.

She began on classical piano at about five. In junior high school she became curious about rock guitar through her older sister and brother, and she entered Fukushima Prefectural Fukushima High School in 2009 hoping to play in a band. The school had no light-music club, so she joined the jazz research club instead. In a 2020 interview with the magazine ARBAN she said she had little interest in jazz at first and found improvising frightening; she learned by listening to records and copying phrases, whatever the instrument, and named the tenor saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Hank Mobley as players she especially liked. Her club played small combos rather than big-band charts, performing standards such as "Someday My Prince Will Come" and "Days of Wine and Roses" twice a year. A jazz kissa called Mingus in central Fukushima City was a hub for the local scene, and jam sessions there widened her circle. Japanese Wikipedia says that hearing Grant Green and Jim Hall there set her on the path of jazz guitar, and a JAZZ TOKYO biography singles out Green's "Matador" and adds that the school is also one that Otomo Yoshihide attended.

In 2012 she moved to Tokyo to go to university, which Japanese Wikipedia gives as Hosei University, where she also joined the jazz club. Sessions with professionals and a growing number of gigs persuaded her to turn professional; she has said that in her third year she told her lab classmates she would become a guitarist after graduating. Her first model for a Japanese jazz guitarist was Yoshiaki Okayasu, whom she had seen play in Fukushima on tour. She later asked him for lessons in Tokyo, and it was on his recommendation that she chose a full-hollow-body guitar. Japanese Wikipedia names Ikuo Shiosaki as a second teacher. She reached the final of the Gibson Jazz Guitar Contest in 2015 and started working as a professional in 2016.

That year the guitarist Mitsukuni Tanabe invited his senior, Sadanori Nakamure, and the then newly emerging Asari to form a guitar trio. Because all three played vintage instruments it was first called the Vintage Guitar Trio, and a 2018 issue of Jazz Guitar Magazine ran a feature under that name. It was later renamed Generations Guitar Trio, both because Tanabe and Asari had started playing other guitars and because the group spanned the generations, from the 1933-born Nakamure to Asari. Nikkei noted in 2020 that she played regularly with the two. Away from the trio, she appeared at Ryozen Jazz Festival in 2017 with the electric bassist Masaru Takahashi and the drummer Yusuke Yaginuma, and a Jazz Near You concert listing places her in a guitar and vocal duo with the singer Chriss Koyama (billed in 2017 as Yuko Koyama) at the Shinjuku club Polkadots on September 30, 2017. The same pairing was listed again at U-ma Kagurazaka in Shinjuku on December 17, 2025.

ReBorn Wood's staff approached her after seeing her play live. She told ARBAN she did not feel ready for an album, but was persuaded that some sounds can only be captured at one point in time, and the label waited about two and a half years. Introducin' was recorded at ReBorn Wood Studios on December 23, 2019, January 29 and 31, 2020, and March 9, 2020, and released on November 25, 2020. She wanted it to be a plain self-introduction: familiar tunes in a natural sound, leaving space rather than filling every bar. Two of the nine tracks are her originals. "Goldfish Droppings" looks back on her Fukushima childhood, when she was nicknamed after the Japanese phrase for a tagalong because she always followed her mother. On "Black Orpheus" she played a guitar duo with Nakamure; they had never played together before the session, and she credits his advice to treat each piece as one continuous story rather than a head followed by solos. Two Carpenters songs, "Sing" and "Close To You," are played as a medley with a trombone and an alto saxophone; they were her first horn arrangements, written with advice from the trombonist Itsumi Komano, and she chose the songs to reach listeners who do not usually listen to jazz. The album ranked first on Amazon's daily jazz chart for consecutive days, according to her official biography and her label. Nikkei reviewed it on December 18, 2020, and ARBAN interviewed her on December 21. A release party was announced for February 18, 2021, at JZbrat in Shibuya.

The pandemic shaped the next two years. Streaming of Introducin' was suspended on May 12, 2021, during a change of distributor, and resumed on June 2. Her official news page announced a release tour for August 13 and 14, 2021, at Mr. Kenny's in Nagoya and Mister Kelly's in Osaka, with a quartet of the pianist Mamoru Ishida, the bassist Daiki Mishima and the drummer Hiro Kimura. Concerts she had planned in Sendai and Fukushima for September 10 to 12 were cancelled or postponed because of COVID-19, and so was her October 9 quartet slot at Yokohama Jazz Promenade. She was billed to play solo guitar on December 14, 2021, at the Sky Garden observation floor of Yokohama Landmark Tower in a Jazz Promenade event, and she announced an appearance at Kagoshima Jazz Festival 2021 that month. In 2022 her news page lists a small tour of Shibuya, Yamagata, Sendai and Fukushima on July 7 to 10 (the Fukushima date, at Fukushima Terrsa, was with her old high-school jazz club), a Yokohama Jazz Promenade set on October 8 billed as ReBorn Wood Sessions with May Inoue and Mao Sone, a slot in the clarinetist Eiji Taniguchi's trio at Kawasaki Jazz on October 29, and a Kawasaki Jazz concert on November 12 with the pianist Chihiro Hosokawa, the percussionist Yu Hatakeyama and the rakugo performer Shota Shunputei as special guest. Generations Guitar Trio (HD Impression) came out on November 9, 2022.

Thanks For Emily, released on April 19, 2023, is her tribute to the American guitarist Emily Remler. The label suggested a second album, and she used it to record originals written during the pandemic alongside standards, with a quartet of her own generation: the pianist Kento Tsubosaka, Mishima on bass and the drummer Hayato Yamazaki, with the tenor saxophonist Yasuki Sogabe and the flutist Shun Katayama as guests. Five of the nine tracks are her originals, written for Remler, and "Blues For Herb" is Remler's own tribute to Herb Ellis, which closes the record. She told the blog Jazz Guitar Yorimichi Note that it was a coincidence that the album opens with her tribute and ends with Remler's. Her label says the release tour sold out at several venues, among them Cotton Club in Tokyo's Marunouchi on June 21, 2023, the final date after stops in Fujieda, Nagoya, Matsusaka and Osaka. On February 16, 2024, she was billed in a concert called Jazz Nagakute at the Kaze no Hall in Nagakute, Aichi, with the pianist Tomohiko Kato, Mishima and Yamazaki. In December 2024 she was the guest in an episode of AKASAKA GTR Lounge, an interview, talk and duo-playing series published on the channel of the guitarist Koichi Yabori. In 2025 her news page lists Niseko Jazz Festival on July 18, then Tohoku shows on August 1 in Yamagata and August 2 at Fukushima Terrsa, the latter co-led with the alto saxophonist Shun Kumagai.

In 2026 she reached ten years as a professional. Midnight Jazz: Final Fantasy IX (Square Enix Music, February 11, 2026), a jazz arrangement album built on Nobuo Uematsu's score, lists her on guitar on "Tantalus's Theme," arranged by Shun Katayama, according to MusicBrainz. Enter A New Phase followed on April 15, 2026. It is an organ-guitar-drums trio with Nobuyoshi Nagata and Yusuke Yaginuma and the alto saxophonist Akane Ezawa as a guest on three tracks, and it holds four standards and four originals. The opening track is Chick Corea's "Chick's Tune." The title looks ahead to her second decade, and the radio program Jazz Tonight played that track on May 9, 2026. Her news page lists the release concerts in Nagoya on April 19 and at Akasaka Virtuoso on May 1, Kansai dates from April 16 to 18 (the Kyoto night a memorial concert for Yutaka Terai, the Kobe night with the singer Rei Takagi as guest) and Tohoku dates from April 23 to 27, the Tohoku trio with Yamazaki on drums. On August 14, 2026, she led a trio with the bassist Hajime Teshima and Hiro Kimura at No Trunks in Kunitachi, a sold-out show that Michael Pronko reviewed for Jazz in Japan.

Asari plays mainstream jazz guitar in the swinging, blues-inflected tradition of the 1950s and 1960s. She told Nikkei in 2020 that her roots are bebop and hard bop and that she prefers heavy, bluesy jazz to fast, light contemporary styles; the paper described her sound as bluesy and swinging. Her ReBorn Wood artist page lists Grant Green, Jim Hall, Peter Bernstein, Emily Remler, John Scofield and Brian Setzer as favourite guitarists, and her favourite albums include Green's Matador, Dexter Gordon's Our Man in Paris, Remler's East to Wes, Hank Mobley's Soul Station and Art Farmer's Live at the Half Note; the first album she ever bought herself, it adds, was a pop record. Blog reviewers of Thanks For Emily heard Wes Montgomery in her "Polkadots And Moonbeams," Jim Hall in "Lonely New Year" and Green in "Blues For Herb." In the Jazz Guitar Yorimichi Note interview she said her choice of "How Insensitive" reflected her love of Remler's duo recordings with Larry Coryell.

Reviewers of the later records stress clarity and restraint. Hisashi Toshima wrote in 2023 that she had matured since her debut and praised a clear, well-defined tone. After her trio show in Kunitachi, Michael Pronko wrote that her playing was complex yet fluid, that her phrasing was like a singer shaping each note, and that she introduced songs well from the stage. Enter A New Phase moves her from the piano quartets of the first two records to an organ trio. One reviewer heard it as orthodox four-beat jazz that does not tip into soul or funk, while the master of the Matsuwa jazz kissa heard the organ adding a funkier, more soulful edge to her clean, bop-based lines.

Her main guitar is a 1957 Gibson ES-175, and a Gibson L-4 appears on the cover of the debut. For Thanks For Emily she recorded through an Udo Roesner Da Capo 75 amplifier, re-amped through a Fender Champ and blended by song, with a Dunlop 1 mm pick and Thomastik round-wound strings from 13 to 53 gauge, as she described to Jazz Guitar Yorimichi Note.