Bio.

Hiroshi was not a normal child. They knew it and their family knew it. The town didn’t know it. It was a secret. Their parents, the Ono family, kept it a secret because Hiroshi might be a mystical spirit (neither Hiroshi nor their parents have figured out whether they were a human or a tanuki originally).

They’d found Hiroshi in their chicken coop, a tanuki puppy harassing the birds. When they started to chase them away, Hiroshi turned into a small child, no more than two years old. The Onos tried and failed to find their original family, so they decided to keep them.

Hiroshi didn’t remember much before that, only a few vague memories of the forest, rivers, and music. Music was the one thing that could always keep Hiroshi’s interest; they could play almost any instrument they got their hands on. Though a generally bright child, they were very unambitious. They did well in school only due to their parents pushing them to get high marks. Whenever they felt they were under too much pressure to be a child prodigy (which was often), they’d turn into a raccoon dog and wander off for a few hours.

When Hiroshi graduated high school and with much prodding from his parents, Hiroshi applied to many prestigious universities all over the world. When they was accepted to Columbia University in New York, it occurred to Hiroshi that a side effect of going to college abroad was that they’d be free of the pressure from their parents to perform as well.

Naturally, they jumped at the chance and went to New York to study musicology. Hiroshi found themself more interested in the indie music scene than in school. Hiroshi also found friends among the lgbt and drag communities, though they found it hard to make deep connections. Over the course of his foray into the indie music scene, Hiroshi drew attention to themself from a man called Kita Haru, a kitsune who’d been living in the US for some decades, running a magical menagerie. Kita recognized Hiroshi as a tanuki and took them to the menagerie, believing this would be a better place for a tanuki than the fast-paced and stressful life of the city. However, Hiroshi became extremely despondent and depressed in captivity and didn’t learn much about their abilities from Kita, so he eventually gave up, determining that Hiroshi had lived among humans too long to truly reconnect to their tanuki heritage. Kita hid the memories of the menagerie from Hiroshi’s mind and put them back where he’d found them–busking on the side of the street.

Unfortunately, too much time had passed and this meant that Hiroshi wouldn’t be able to renew their student visa as it had expired and Hiroshi’s only idea of why this had happened was far too many drugs. But they didn’t want to move back in with their parents, even temporarily while applying for a new visa, so Hiroshi had to find a way to avoid getting deported.

They currently fly under the radar, crashing with friends who allow it, and playing music for money as much as they can.