The following contains Japanese and Chinese text, which may or may not display properly for you.
A few words on this one. I have no conscious recollection of hearing the name "Kitaro" until I came up with it for this character. Even then I was just casting about for something I could plausibly shorten to "Kit", and had no notion that his ethnic background was anything unusual. When the name popped into my head I decided I liked it, but it made for a conundrum since I had already decided on the broader geopolitical setting, and a Japanese-sounding name (as this plainly was) didn't fit. A Japan-analogue therefore became a necessity, and from there many other features of the story arc and world map arose.
Kitaro (more properly Kitarou or Kitarō) is a genuine Japanese name, and when I looked around to see what kind of associations might come with it I found people like new-age musician Takahashi Masanori, who uses Kitaro as a stage name; a youkai, the title character of an old manga and anime called
GeGeGe no Kitarō; and Nishida Kitarō, a philosopher whose work involved reconciling Eastern and Western systems of philosophical thought.
The philosopher spelled his name 幾多郎, the musician is 喜多郎, and the youkai is 鬼太郎. There are a number of possible Kanji for it, such as 紀太朗 and many others. I might use any of them for my character should the issue ever arise, but none of them had a very pertinent meaning in any part except for those ending in 朗 , which means melodius, clear, or bright. (The more common 郎 signifies "son". It's clearly applicable, but not particularly so.)
However, if I were to depart from customary orthography, one possible rendering is 気天朗. 気 is the modern Japanese version of the Chinese character 氣 (traditional) or 气 (simplified), signifying
ki or
qi as explained in this chapter. 天 as "ta" in Japanese is one of a number of possible Nanori readings that only occur in names in modern usage. The character signifies heaven or the sky in either Chinese or Japanese. The Chinese pronunciation is
tian, and as Wei-fu explains here 天氣,
tian qi, is the word for weather.
Having spent over 40 years in Hachido, Wei-fu is perfectly fluent and literate in
Yorozushimago, and is familiar with how the characters of the Middle Land are used there. When he first spotted Kitaro the coincidence of that possible rendering immediately struck him, and as soon as he recovered his composure he suggested to Ochiya that she alter it accordingly.
Since this chapter should make it clear that Kitaro is not going to Hachido anytime soon this isn't of terribly great importance to the story, but I felt like sharing it anyway.
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