adventures in japanese names

[piranha]

because i can't leave a puzzle alone. of not much interest to anyone else, i am copying this here as a reference for myself.



tip for people who want others to help them with kanji: give us an image on which one can actually READ them, an image large enough so none of the kanji become mere squiggly blobs. in the image this person gave i simply could not make heads or tails of the second kanji at all.

--- In nakama-manga@yahoogroups.com, somebody wrote:
>
> I know that this picture is from the cover of a yaoi anthology called
> JSM featuring several different mangakas but what I can't figure out is
> who did the illustration. It says right on the cover but I can't read
> kanji so I was wondering if someone who can read it could tell me what
> it says.

the magazine is iSM (イズム) :) i don't recognize the mangaka from the art at all, but luckily somebody else mentioned "a sex therapist", so i could get a version of the image that was large enough to decypher the kanji. the mangaka's name is 犬塚凶互.

that results in nothing on manga updates or jpqueen. it gives exactly 4 results in google, *sigh*, all of which refer to this issue of iSM, so that's the right spelling. i'll give you the readings for the kanji, but japanese names are hard to figure out even if you have those.

犬 = kou or inu
塚 = chou or tsuka
凶 = kyou or warui
互 = go, ko, or tagai

my guess is that the given name is kyouko because that's not uncommon. more guessing: the family name is inutsuka (inudzuka, inuzuka). note that i could be completely wrong, without another reference one really can't tell for sure; this is just a likely guess. i've never heard of this mangaka, but maybe somebody else recognizes them.

---

i've gotten really good at finding kanji via the multi-radical search at jim breen's site, and i often try to figure out names when the cover of a magazine is all i have, and i'm getting a pretty decent success rate now that i have started to get a feel for the sound of japanese names. wondering whether i'll ever see this one again, and whether i was right in my guesses, *heh*. (.iSM #004 for future reference.)

Comments

[rockthecj.livejournal.com]

The art style of that illustration is strikingly similar to a raw oneshot in my hard drive. I'll try to track it down and when I find it, I'll get back to you on the name. =]

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

that would rock!

[rockthecj.livejournal.com]

The name is INUDUKA Kyogo. =]

a wee rant about romanization

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

ha! close but no cigar! :) romanization variants will be the death of me some day; i don't use 'du' at all because 'dzu'/'zu' sound more right to me, and so i forget that this is a common alternate. i am a little doubtful of the 'kyo' instead of 'kyou', since i see the lengthening う dropped all the time from romanizations but it is actually there when you get a chance to hear the names pronounced. like 川唯東子 romanizes her name kawai toko, but it's really pronounced with a long とう. or 河口恭吾 kawaguchi kyogo the singer, that's also a long きょう. romanization by its nature often looses some nuance, but i hate it if it is made to loose information that the system could actually easily convey.

thanks a lot! that was really good, to recognize the art from a single oneshot. what was the oneshot called? any chance of sharing it? i checked aarin but a search brought up nothing.

[gardenprophet.livejournal.com]

Wow, you sound like me. :) Good to know that I am not alone... saves me from feeling like a complete geek. ;p

ah Japanese yaoi pen names... how you cause me to bang my head against available surfaces.