And as if to demonstrate her mechanical deficiency, there was a time when she stayed at a hotel before a concert and almost froze because she didn't realize that what she thought was a light switch was actually the heating switch.

     There was a "wake up call incident" during the '96 concert tour. Hekiru, who is definitely not a morning person, asked her manager to give her a wake up call.
Manager: Hekiruuuu. Wake up!!
Hekiru: I'm awake....
Manager: Well, okay, but it's going to be a problem if you go back to sleep without hanging up, so put the receiver back.
Hekiru: I did....
Manager: Oh really?!
Hekiru: Really... I put it back...
Somehow or other, she made it on time that day. ^^

     She hates the cold (in winter she wears three pairs of socks and has different-sized shoes!), but she loves snow and the one thing she really likes is to see everything pure white.

     Ajinori onna! A couple years back, when her fan club first started up, she was famous for loving it. Then at the one-year anniversary of 4179*LOVE (her fan club), she announced that she had graduated from it! When she was asked why she stopped eating it, she said, "I got sick of it!"
But then, she went back to it. On a whim, she'll eat it with a bowl of plain rice. When asked during her '97 summer concert, "Didn't you say you graduated off it?" she said, "Well, now I don't eat the whole can at once like I used to."

     If Hekiru hadn't become a seiyuu, what would she be? She said, "The mornings would be really tough, but maybe a running a flower shop or a cake shop?"

     Hekiru likes to cook. She will look up recipes in books, but never follow them precisely because she likes to make her own variations. She says that she really likes to cook for someone and then see their happy face.
[I wonder if this is till true? This information is about 2 years old.]

     She gets nightmares before concerts. Getting on stage and suddenly forgetting the lyrics is pretty standard I guess, but she also has bad dreams about waking up and discovering her eyebrows are gone?!?

     Hekiru prefers briefs over boxers?! She made an off-hand comment on one of her radio shows... ^^;;
[On another show, she mentioned that she would always get very embarassed at her concerts when her male fans in the front rows start stripping to the waist. But, she didn't say to stop or anything... ^^]

     Hekiru also suffers from hayfever, which means that a lot of her mail in the spring tends to come from fellow hayfever afflicted people.

     Hekiru has very strong notions about love and romance. Love is very important to her, and she does want to get married when she meets the right person, someone who can protect and support her. Her ideal marriage is one where she and her husband are in their 60s, but they still love each other as much as before.

Of course, Hekiru is not simply fun and games. Far from it, she is a very mature person who is always aiming for a new goal. When she first began her career, one could have called her dreams naive, but to see her now is to feel awed and humbled by what she has achieved. In less than two years of performing her first live, she has fulfilled her goal of performing at Nippon Budoukan, the largest concert hall in Tokyo of capacity 9000. An incredible feat, really, considering that most successful singers tend to be factory-produced by the Japanese entertainment industry.

Hekiru has fought all the way to impose the image she wanted on her career. After her first album Shiena, she went directly to Sony and requested a change of image. She hit a slump in 1996, as she tried to improve her singing style and find a sound that she liked. Unfortunately, there was no-one she could turn to for help. But with her Starting Legend '97 ~with a will~ concert tour, she finally pulled through. Since then, her singing has improved dramatically. She became very involved in the production of her new CD, Baby blue eyes, changing producers and selecting each song herself. She likes drums and guitar, and until that point she had not been quite satisfied with the songs that she was singing. But this time, she listened to countless CDs and MDs, searching for the image that she had in her mind all those years, and finally found it.

Her producers recall her running breathless into the room at their first meeting, cheeks flushed and her face coated in perspiration, and proceeding to drop a whole load of MDs on the table. "These are the types of songs I want to sing!" For each song, she had a description written saying exactly what she liked about it. It is this dedication and persistance that makes her different from the other idol singers out there.

Because while she is an idol singer, she has taken charge of her career and steered it in the direction she wanted. She is not satisfied to be just another idol, she wants to be real artist, a singer who legitimately succeeds on the strength of her vocal performance. In the past, Hekiru had been dissatisfied and frustrated and said that she felt as if she was being made to sing. Now, she truly enjoys it. As a result, her performance at concerts has improved tremendously as well.

Hekiru always has a very strong image in her mind of what she wants to do, or how she wants to do something. This is what drives her ambition, but it also causes problems because she has difficulty communicating her ideas to other people. She simply does not, cannot express her thoughts in a way a normal person would. As the bass player of her old band, Hekibands, said, "While she can see the colour red in her head, she can't tell us it's red." Frustrating for both Hekiru and the people around her. But at last, it seems that she has finally found herself.