So I’ve been very casually learning Japanese for around a year and a half now. And I understand kanji have several pronunciations. However, I was watching JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. And the main villain’s name is 吉良吉影. I was curious what the individual kanji for his name meant, so I looked them up. But as I was looking at the pronunciations I found that none of them have any pronunciations that match how his surname is pronounced (it’s pronounced “Kira”)? I checked on multiple different sites too.
I’m gonna list the only pronunciations I found for these kanji below. And I’m just curious if I’m looking at incomplete pronunciation lists or if there’s something else going on that I haven’t learned yet.
吉: キチ、キツ、よし
良:リョウ、よい、いい
7 comments
吉良 can be the surname Kira.
The kanji reading lists don’t always list every way it could be read when it’s a name (which is a much longer list than the “usual” readings).
It’s a manga. It doesn’t necessarily have to be realistic name.
Fictional names don’t need to match up
Yomi do not always cover proper name pronunciations
Japanese pronunciation for names don’t necessarily follow common on or kun yomi readings/pronunciations.
Like kutsurogitai mentioned, this is an example of “nanori”, or name readings that don’t always get listed in dictionary. In general, though, the Japanese tend to get pretty creative with kanji pronunciations, so you can’t expect the reading an author chooses for a particular character to always line up with the conventional readings given in a dictionary.
There was a samurai in the Edo period who had the same surname.
He is very famous as a villain.
It probably came from him.
吉良 上野介
キラ コウノスケ
kira kounosuke
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kira_Yoshinaka?wprov=sfti1
There is a prefecture in Japan called Nara where the ra is that kanji as well. 奈良
Sometimes place names and people names have more rare and older readings for kanji. If you look at the names of train stations and bus stations around Japan you will find so many of those.