Stories about encounters between different cultures usually need two kinds of sound: the clash of blades in battle, and the quieter sound of hearts drawing closer even when words fail. The spring 2026 TV anime The Princess Knight and the Barbarian Groom carries both, and the composer entrusted with its entire score is Alisa Okehazama. On July 1, an original soundtrack condensing her work was released as a 2-CD set (catalog no. FBAC-263, 3,300 yen incl. tax). The cross-cultural fantasy genre is musically tricky: it can easily settle into shorthand where "battle equals heroic" and "daily life equals cozy." This soundtrack carefully avoids that easy path.
The composer of 'Jujutsu Kaisen,' flying solo
Alisa Okehazama was born in 1993 in Okehazama, Aichi Prefecture. After roughly six years as an assistant to a screen-music composer, she began working in earnest as a composer and arranger in 2020. What made her name widely known was the soundtrack to the TV anime Jujutsu Kaisen, which she wrote alongside Hiroaki Tsutsumi and Yorihisa Terui. She has since expanded into acclaimed titles like Onimai: I'm Now Your Sister! and The Apothecary Diaries, as well as live-action dramas such as Ooku and Hayabusa Fire Brigade. Her range runs from flashy synth-driven numbers to delicate emotional writing. Having long supported big projects as one member of a team, here she takes charge of an entire work's sonic world on her own. How her authorial voice, sometimes buried in collaborations, rises when it stands under a solo credit is the first pleasure of listening.
Battle and daily life, split across two discs
As the official site puts it, the score "condenses music that colors battle, everyday life, and the exchange of hearts." The soundtrack translates the ups and downs of this cross-cultural drama directly into a wide sonic range: earthy rhythms and percussion evoking a barbarian settlement, melodies tracing the inner life of the princess knight Serafina, and the surge of combat. The two-disc volume is a vessel large enough to hold these different textures without discarding any of them. Being able to move between "flashy action" and "quiet emotion" under a single composer's pen is a strength unique to Okehazama, who has crossed many genres. In screen music especially, a character's theme reappears again and again, shifting orchestration and key from scene to scene. Heard together, the two discs reveal that craft of variation, and you realize the melodies you caught in fragments during the show were laid out along a single musical blueprint.
From 'Okehazama' to 'barbarian'
It makes for a curious coincidence. A composer who bears the name of the land famous for one of the Sengoku era's greatest surprise attacks, the Battle of Okehazama, now scores a fantasy about a cultural collision of swords and magic. Yet the theme of this work lies less in battle itself than in an affirmation of diversity: "your true self is your one and only beauty." Both Mayu Maeshima, who sings the opening theme "BEAUTIFUL," and sajou no hana, behind the ending theme "Shirubeki Koto," spoke to that same idea. Okehazama's score shoulders both the force of clashing swords and the warmth of different people meeting halfway.
Searching for the sound of 'understanding'
A score exists to accompany the story, but the moment it is carved out as a soundtrack, it becomes an album worth hearing on its own. Listen to the two discs all the way through and you may realize that what this story truly wanted to sound out was not the noise of battle, but the sound of the moment two sides come to understand each other. More than the swell of a flashy fight, it is in the single step across into another's heart beyond words, in that quiet tension and release, that Okehazama's pen burns hottest. As a fantasy soundtrack and as a culmination under a composer's solo name, this is a record rich in things to listen for, in two senses at once.
