Mai Kuraki became one of the biggest J-pop stars of the 2000s, right up there with Ayumi Hamasaki and Hikaru Utada. Like Hamasaki, she writes her own lyrics, and as commercial achievements go, she holds the record for most consecutive Top Ten singles in Japan (she's had over 30 of them). Her early material showed a strong R&B influence -- she decided to be a musician at an early age after becoming acquainted with the music of Whitney Houston and the dance moves of Michael Jackson -- but later she drifted toward mainstream pop. Her good looks never hurt her career, either. Kuraki's story of success was as easy as pie -- when still in high school, she submitted a demo to Giza Studio and got signed. The label was so impressed with her that it tried to market her in the U.S. first: her professional debut single, "Baby I Like" (1999) was recorded in Cybersound Studio in Boston under the name Mai K. It flopped, but label execs realized how her potential could be applied, and moved her back to Japan, where she debuted with the single "Love, Day After Tomorrow" (1999), which turned out to be a chart-topping million-seller. Two other singles, "Stay by My Side" and "Secret of My Heart" (both 2000), sold over 900,000 copies each, charting at number one and number two respectively ("Secret of My Heart" lost to Masaharu Fukuyama's biggest hit "Sakurasaka"), and her debut album, Delicious Way, shifted 3.4 million units and became the top-selling Japanese album of 2000.