Saori Hara

She started as an idol called Mai Nanami in the early part of the last decade, the kind of soft-focus career that was never supposed to lead where it did. When she reinvented herself as Saori Hara, the transition was abrupt enough to generate its own controversy: she and photographer Kishin Shinoyama were charged with public indecency after a nude shoot conducted in public spaces around Tokyo. That legal trouble preceded her adult career's peak, not its end. What ended it was the Tohoku earthquake. She has said the disaster triggered a nervous breakdown severe enough that she left the industry entirely and spent an uncertain stretch working part-time jobs — not transitioning, just surviving. She married a man nearly a quarter century older than her, signed to a mainstream talent agency, and took a name chosen by someone else. The reason she has given publicly for attempting the comeback is the one that is hardest to dismiss: she wanted her mother to see her as a performer, not an adult actress. She is now a mother of twins.