Norio Sakurai is a Japanese manga artist born on July 1, 1985, in Ageo, Saitama Prefecture. She began drawing manga in elementary school, with the goal of becoming a professional artist solidifying around her second year of middle school, influenced by a friend who also drew. She made her professional debut in 2003 after winning the 58th Akatsuka Award for a one-shot story and also received the Rookie of the Year Award from Weekly Shōnen Champion the same year.

Sakurai’s first serialized work was Kodomo Gakkyū, which ran from 2003 to 2005. She achieved wider recognition with Mitsudomoe, a comedy series that was serialized from 2006 to 2017. This work was adapted into a television anime in 2010. Following this, she created Rororro!, which was published from 2016 to 2020. Her most recent and commercially successful series is The Dangers in My Heart (Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu), which began serialization in 2018 and received a television anime adaptation in 2023, with a second season airing in 2024. The manga won the top prize in the web category of the Next Manga Awards in 2020.

As a creator, Sakurai identifies her work as rooted in comedy, having grown up reading gag manga such as Crayon Shin-chan and works by Momoko Sakura. She has cited the series Urayasu Tekkin Kazoku as a significant influence on her paneling and pacing. Her early works were drawn almost entirely by herself using analog methods, but with the concurrent serialization of Rororro! and The Dangers in My Heart, she transitioned to digital art and began employing assistants, particularly for background art.

Her approach to storytelling is character-driven, often starting by envisioning what the characters would do and then constructing situations around them. For The Dangers in My Heart, she explained that the genesis came from being an idol fan and imagining how an idol would interact with classmates in a school setting. She crafts protagonist Kyotaro Ichikawa by imagining her own actions and feelings in his position, aiming to maintain a close empathetic connection. The character of Anna Yamada is described as a reflection of what she personally finds cute, drawing from the earnest yet clumsy qualities of idols she admires as well as the capricious nature of her pet cat. Sakurai has noted that the series is her first to focus significantly on the inner lives of its characters, which brought a new form of creative uncertainty compared to her pure comedy works.

The recurring theme of adolescent emotional turbulence is central to her work. In The Dangers in My Heart, she uses the structure of medical records, or "Karte," for chapter titles to signify the protagonist’s "illness" of chuunibyou, or adolescent delusions, and his gradual emotional development. She has described her creative process as drawing whatever comes to mind without being overly selective, focusing on finding common ground with her characters even when they are very different from herself. Her artistic style has evolved significantly over her career, from a simpler, rougher aesthetic suited for gag comics to a more refined and polished approach that emphasizes character beauty, which became particularly pronounced in the later volumes of The Dangers in My Heart.