Himiko Kikuchi (菊池ひみこ) was born on 2 March 1953 in Sendai, in Miyagi Prefecture, and grew up in the port town of Shiogama. She started classical piano as a small child and from the age of seven studied with Ruiko Koga of Miyagi Gakuin Women's University and with Takako Horie, a professor at the Tokyo University of the Arts. At twelve she took second place in a Yamaha Electone competition playing Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, and her official profile says she won the same contest at sixteen, after beginning composition lessons at fifteen. Concert tours of the United States, Mexico and the Philippines came before she settled in Japan as a professional.

Her first professional years were in rock and folk, playing with Takuro Yoshida, Tsunehiko Kamijo, Mayumi Itsuwa and Junko Ohashi. Around 1975 she turned to jazz and began studying with the pianist Sadayasu Fujii. According to her official profile she filled in for a member of Nobuo Hara's big band Sharps & Flats, and she joined Bingo Miki's Inner Galaxy Orchestra, a large jazz ensemble recorded by Three Blind Mice. Discogs credits her on electric piano and clavinet on the orchestra's Back to the Sea (Three Blind Mice, recorded at Epicurus Studio in Tokyo on 20, 27, 28 and 29 June 1978), a band that also included the tenor saxophonist Hidehiko Matsumoto, the pianist Masaru Imada and the guitarist Masatsugu Matsumoto, who later became her husband. On 11 July 1979 the orchestra played the Montreux Jazz Festival, with Kikuchi on keyboards, and the concert was issued as the double album Montreux Cyclone. She also played piano on the orchestra's The Eve, recorded in Iruma, Saitama, in July 1980.

Her own debut came in 1980. Don't Be Stupid (Continental HL-5003) was recorded between November 1979 and January 1980 with the American saxophonist Ernie Watts, her guitarist Matsumoto, a horn section and strings, with Kikuchi on acoustic piano, Fender Rhodes, Mini Moog, Oberheim and Solina synthesizers and clavinet, and she sang on it too. Flashing followed in 1981, again with Watts and the band Dead End. For All Right (1982) she went to Los Angeles and recorded at Mad Hatter Studios from 12 to 27 September 1981 with Watts, the drummer John Robinson, the percussionist Steve Forman, the trumpeter Allen Vizzutti and others. Her official profile says it reached the top three of Oricon's jazz category and earned a hit award. Woman (1983), which she produced, with composing and arranging credits shared with Matsumoto, includes "Make Up In The Morning," a piece she returned to on the Double Quartet's 2007 album. Reverse It (1984) opens with "Hollywood Illusion," which Japanese Wikipedia says was used as a television theme and in commercials, and 森羅万象 (Shinra Banshō), released on 21 October 1985, was her last Continental studio album. Two best-of compilations on the label, in 1984 and 1986, were followed by a third in 1988.

Outside her own records she was a working studio musician and arranger. In February 1981, at King Studio in Tokyo, she played piano on the American saxophonist Richie Cole's Cool "C" (Seven Seas) and arranged six of its seven tracks. She arranged "Twilight Time" and played keyboards on the Super Sax Ensemble's Runaway (Far East, 1981), a saxophone-section album with Takeru Muraoka and Hidefumi Toki among the saxophonists. In 1985 she is credited as pianist and arranger on Muraoka's own Stardust: Takeru Muraoka Plays Standards (CBS/Sony).

At CBS/Sony she made Flying Beagle (21 October 1987) and Sevilla Breeze (21 November 1988), the second a Latin-flavoured digital recording built on Spanish themes, among them a "Gypsy Song" from Carmen. In 1992 she wrote the music for the Toei film Shin Gokudō no Tsumatachi: Kakugo Shiya (released in 1993) and formed a brass-rock band, Beam, from a jazz quartet, five horns and Latin percussion; the soundtrack album Beam came out on RCA in January 1993. She also composed and arranged the music for the NHK Educational anime Spoon-hime no Swing Kitchen between 1997 and 1999, according to Japanese Wikipedia.

In 1999 she and Matsumoto moved to Tottori. After the 2000 Chugoku-Shikoku Big Band Jazz Festival she expanded Beam's horns to thirteen and re-formed it as the Himiko Kikuchi Big Band, which recorded the double CD Himiko Kikuchi Big Band Live (Flying Beagle Corp, 14 October 2000). For the 17th National Cultural Festival, held in Tottori Prefecture in 2002, she wrote a jazz piano concerto, Furusato: Home In My Soul, on the school song "Furusato," and as music director led a full orchestra of professionals and amateurs, a children's chorus and her own jazz quartet at the opening ceremony. She revived it in 2005 at the National Lifelong Learning Festival, also in Tottori, where a children's chorus formed for the occasion recorded it on CD (Flying Beagle Corp, FBCM-004, 9 October 2005). That year she received the 30th Tottori City Culture Award. She has also led the Holy Gang Gospel Choir since 2000, and her jazz quartet combined with a string quartet as the Himiko Kikuchi Double Quartet, which recorded DQ * The Live! (11 May 2007).

Kikuchi is a central figure in the Tottori JAZZ festival, which began in 2011 and mixes jazz with art in the city's streets and venues. She chaired its executive committee for the 10th edition in 2020, and the festival's own site now lists her as its former chair. With Matsumoto she gave a concert in Tottori on 15 December 2021 marking fifty years in music for both of them. In 2022 she took a band of Japanese and American players to Ornithology Jazz Club in Brooklyn on 30 August and to the Detroit International Jazz Festival on 4 September, according to a listing from the Japan Foundation, and in September 2026 PBS's Detroit Performs broadcast her set with the Tottori Young Lions Trio from the 47th Detroit Jazz Festival. In 2024 her Continental albums arrived on streaming services in May and her CBS/Sony albums in October, and Flying Beagle and Sevilla Breeze were reissued from 2023 remasters. She is 73 and still active.

Kikuchi is a jazz fusion pianist with a strong Latin streak. The Discogs style tags on her Continental and CBS/Sony albums run through fusion, Latin jazz and jazz-funk, and a television biography credits her with weaving Brazilian and Latin elements into her work. She plays acoustic piano and Fender Rhodes, and on the early albums a bank of synthesizers: Mini Moog, Prophet 5, Oberheim and Solina. Her rhythm section is usually her husband's guitar, electric bass and drums, with a tenor saxophone, often Hirofumi Kinjo or Ernie Watts, carrying the front line.

Bebop and the jazz canon stay in view even on her electric records. She arranged the bebop alto saxophonist Richie Cole's Tokyo date, her big band includes a "Bird Fantasy Suite" and Dizzy Gillespie's "A Night in Tunisia" and "Manteca," and the same set takes in Jaco Pastorius's "Teen Town" and Herbie Hancock's "Hang Up Your Hangups." The writing therefore sits on both sides of fusion: tightly arranged horn voicings from the large-ensemble tradition, and funk-inflected rhythm-section grooves.

Her classical training is audible too, in the concerto-scale Furusato: Home In My Soul and in a Chopin "Fantaisie-Impromptu" arrangement she filmed with the Double Quartet.