Need a surname for a Japanese Demon/Ghost hunter

So I've recently had some inspiration to come up with a new setting and characters for a short story. The protagonist is a Japanese schoolgirl with demonic powers who fights demons and evil spirits. Problem is, me not being Japanese and having no experience coming up with thematic Japanese names, I'm kind of stuck for a surname. I've decided her given name is 'Tsukiko', and that she was born during an eclipse (which coincided with a horde of demons escaping from hell), and I want to carry on the theme into the surname as well, but having searched Japanese names and their meaning and not finding much to work with I'm a bit stuck. Ideally, I'd like a name something along the lines of 'Moon/Night/Darkness/Guardian', or something like that. The character also has a Superpowered Evil Side named 'Tsukiyomi' as well, so the Moon/Night theme is something I'd really like to keep going. Either that, or something that relates to having demonic blood. For a while, I almost settled on 'Akagi' (which means 'Red Tree' if the internet is to be believed), but then I stopped and realised that this would make the character 'Tsukiko Akagi', and given that she's a black haired schoolgirl in a red coat who goes around fighting supernatural creatures, I think that would be a little too close to the name of a character from a certain well-known RPG franchise.

So yeah, any suggestions would be appreciated.

this might help: http://www.wa-pedia.com/language/japanese_surnames.shtml

Yeah, I came across that list, but it seems kind of limited. There were some longer ones, but I couldn't really find anything that jumped out at me. Also, with many Japanese surnames being derived from geographic features, it's kind of hard to get one with the kind of thematic symbolism I'm after.

Guess it's back to checking this list for now.

Is it possible to chop and change different parts of names to come up with a viable surname? It seems Japanese names are made up of several smaller words joined together. Can anyone with knowledge of kanji (hell, anyone who's actually Japanese for that matter) help with this? Rather not end up looking like an ignorant western hack writer by giving my character a nonsensical name.

edited 15th Mar '16 4:37:48 PM by OmegaKross

For example, the words for 'Curse' and 'Blood' (Noroi and Ketsueki if google is to be believed) really don't seem like they join together well. 'Noroiketsueki' does not seem like it can be used as a name. Also, it's a bit overt, seems like it would be the equivalent of naming someone 'Dave Evilmurderingbastardballs'.

EDIT: Okay, after a bit of guesswork and google searching, I'm probably going to fall back on either 'Akazawa' (red swamp I think), or Yamikawa (dark river, probably), unless I get a better idea from somebody. Akazawa has a nice ring to it and could be taken as a reference to corrupted blood, and Yamikawa sounds cool and can easily be taken to refer to a dark bloodline. But if anyone can give me something better, it'd be a help.

Also, 'Yagami' has been used too often for me to use it myself. Too cliche', calling someone 'Moon Child Night God'.

EDIT EDIT: Actually, the more I think about it the better it sounds. Yagami might be a bit overused in popular culture, but it does fit the thematic naming I'm trying to evoke.

edited 15th Mar '16 5:48:59 PM by OmegaKross

My suggestion: Don't look for surnames. Search the folklores. That will give you idea and approximation about mythological names and bloodlines.

Also, consider this: Surnames are important. Ancestors will usually name their bloodline with names that can evoke pride, sense of accomplishment. Even "cursed" bloodline will take a name that represent their perceived role or strength, rather than their cursed status.

"-ko" is a bit old-fashioned at this point. Not completely outdated, but like calling someone 'William' even when you know them well. 'Tsuki' is probably fine, so long as it's a homonym for 'moon'. Maybe have her name just be ツキ, all katakana? That's not unpopular nowadays, and it's not intoned the way 月is.

And another (slang) way of saying that someone is lucky is 'tsuite iru'. If she was lucky to survive that event as a kid, I'd call her that.

Now, for that surname. I can pretty much assure you that such themed naming shows up in media when the production staff really wants to get a point across, and I really wouldn't recommend it. The surnames you've come up with are all really literal - the Japanese version of Luke Nounverber without the '-verber' - and you will look like a hack.

(Well, you are one. It's nothing to be ashamed of, necessarily; shots in the dark like that are common in writing. It's why you do the research, and ask questions. Frankly, just realizing you've stopped short of naming your character 'Dave Evilmurderingbastardballs' is a good sign.)

Eh, try something normal-ish like "Kamiya" or "Umeyama". "Akiya" (秋夜) isn't so bad either, I think. The joke being, Autumn Nights are when you go out for Tsukimi. It sounds exactly like the sort of theme naming you'd see in real life.

Regarding folklore, naming her after Japanese mythological creatures wouldn't really work seeing as how she's literally from a demonic lineage - as in actual demons from hell, which are physical embodiments of sin and negative emotion. I considered things like Shikigami and the like, but they wouldn't really work. As for the pride in the name thing, the family actually do take pride in being from a cursed bloodline and their cursed status in general, as their powers enable them to combat the genuine demons and evil spirits. That and the family matriarch is secretly evil, having controlled her Enemy Within via Split-Personality Merge, so she takes being cursed with demonic powers as a source of pride, especially seeing as she's over 120 years old, doesn't look a day over 40, and is still capable of much asskicking.

The -ko suffix seems like it's still used a fair bit in fiction. Using 'William' as an example, it's still a pretty common English name, and someone familiar with them would just say 'Will' or 'Bill', so Tsukiko's name could just be shortened to 'Tsuki' by her friends. The family are pretty traditionalist too, so i don't think it'd be unusual for her to have a slightly out of date name. As for the last names, Akazawa is an actual name as far as I can tell. Yamikawa doesn't seem to be an actual name, but it's been used a couple of times in fiction.

Sorry, but I'm not really a believer in giving extraordinary characters ordinary names. I'll stop short of calling her 'Moon-Child Night-God', but I'm pretty much going to make it slightly unusual. Hell, 'Motoko Kusanagi' is a properly strange name by the author's own admission, and Ghost in the Shell is a huge franchise. This is light novel territory I'm going for, with a heavy dose of dark magic and religious symbolism, so I'm not trying to make it 100% grounded in reality. Mild Luke Nounverber is actually the kind of naming structure I was aiming for. When I said I was trying to avoid looking ignorant, I meant that I wanted to ensure that my character's name at least made sense and wasn't just a random jumble of nonsensical syllables, or an overlong string of mismatched words (AKA, Dave Evilmurderingbastardballs.)

Probably going with 'Tsukiko Yamikawa' then. That does translate to something like 'Moon-Child Dark-River' yes?

edited 15th Mar '16 8:13:08 PM by OmegaKross

The problem isn't that it translates into 'Moon-Child Dark-River', it's that it is Darknessriver Moonchild to Japanese ears, and there's absolutely no mistaking it for any other character/phoneme. ("Yami" is 'darkness' in the sense of pitch-black unnatural darkness and is a noun; "Kura(i)" is 'dark' in the usual sense of 'not well lit' and is an adjective. "Kurakawa" is an extant name, and the one I'd suggest.)

I'm telling you, it still sounds about as silly in Japanese as it does in that English translation. You can be from a demonic lineage and be a scary badass from a well-bred family, but that still won't keep people from chuckling when you introduce yourself as "Mr. Final Intersection" or "Mr. Ford Prefect" or "Mr. Uriah Heep".

(I'm also not sure why "Kusanagi Motoko" would be a strange name either. 'Kusanagi' is uncommon but not unheard of, and I knew at least one 'Motoko' in Hiroshima - a bit older than me, and so probably older than that franchise.)

'-ko' is still used in fiction, but that's because you're not reading stuff written by anyone born after 2000. It's a generational thing; it has a Showa ring to it, and... you might as well have her friends call her O-Tsuki.

EDIT: ...Okay, you gotta use "Dave Evilmurderingbastardballs" as a character name. That's too good to not use somehow.

edited 15th Mar '16 10:00:27 PM by DeusDenuo

Okay, just curious, what kind of underworld we have here? Because, really, things like "evil", dead soul, redemption and stuff are varied through different mythologies. Here' the basic listing. There's things like Hel Realm where normal people (read:don't do anything heroic or worthwhile) goes, there's Hades Realm where heroic ones goes on Elysium, vile and traitorous ones get Tartarus (and suffer Ironic Hell tailored to his/her crime), and the normal ones get... nothing, or some eastern style underworld.

Ah, I see. Yeah, the only word for 'Darkness' that I know is 'Yami'. Kurakawa will probably suffice then, if Yamikawa really does sound that odd. Am I right in thinking it'd sound something like 'Moon-Child RIVER-OF-BLACKEST-DARKNESS' in English? Bear in mind, I was actually going to have characters comment on her strange name. But if it would be odd to the point of being unable to take the character seriously, then I could change it to Kurakawa.

Shirow Masamune said once somewhere that Kusanagi's name is the equivalent of naming a western character 'Jane Excalibur' or something similar (at least I think he did. I could have just read it somewhere, maybe on this site even). I know the Kusanagi is a legendary sword in Japanese mythology, and that it's kind of unusual as a surname. Motoko isn't a particularly strange name as far as I'm aware.

Again regarding the -ko suffix, it works because Tsukiko's family are not only traditionalist, but rather long-lived due to their demonic bloodline. Her grandmother is the head of the family and is over 120 years old, and her mother lived to be almost 200. So it makes sense that a kind of antiquated name would still be in use in her family. And anyways, it is still in modern usage, just less common. And if it sounds kind of off, that works too, as she's something of a social outcast who keeps people at arms length, due to her night job of killing demons with a magic sword and satanic chanting, and the fact that everyone in her bloodline gets a free Enemy Within at birth. Plus, the story takes place in an alternate version of the early 2000's.

And anyways, I've already firmly decided on it in my head. Once something gets to that point I find it pretty much impossible to do a U-turn.

You'll have to explain 'O-Tsuki', my grasp of Japanese cultural expressions is rather lacking.

Yeah, I will have to remember Dave Evilmurderingbastardballs for future reference. He could be the world's most evil assassin or something :p

It's actually the pocket universe of an Eldritch Abomination who is basically the absolute embodiment of darkness and sin. Demons are lesser entities born from the darkest impulses of sentient beings. I concieved of this setting as a break from my usual one, but it is still set in the same multiverse. Just that the Gods, Angels, and Eldritch Abominations are largely staying out of this story.

edited 16th Mar '16 10:57:05 AM by OmegaKross

Hmmm.... okay, after laughing my ass off while browsing As Long as It Sounds Foreign and reading the multitude of examples where Japanese creators gave characters nonsensical European names because they sound cool, I'm gonna stick with Yamikawa and have characters comment in-story on how weird a name it is. Everyone else will get ordinary Japanese names, so it will be clear that I'm deliberately giving Tsukiko a strange name. There is a Bullying a Dragon subplot too, so the weird name will work for that purpose as well. If that makes me come off as a hack, then I'm only as much a hack as every established creator who did the exact same thing, and I'm fine with that.

So, the O-Tsuki thing, I'm guessing that's like some ultra-formal archaic way of addressing someone right? Because if so, I can use that as a derogatory nickname for her.

EDIT: Here's a quote from As Long as It Sounds Foreign, about Code Geass:

With a lot of the surnames, it seems like the writer just opened up a French furnishing catalog and picked whatever words he thought sounded good, so we end up with names that translate to things like Lelouch and Nunnally Red Lamp, Shirley Window, and Rivalz World of Wool Brushes.

Yeah, If Code Geass can get away with that then 'Darkness River' is A-Okay by me.

edited 16th Mar '16 11:21:24 AM by OmegaKross

Well sure, as long as things get lampshaded there's no problem on either side of the pond.

So, from the top. (And the delay is because I work a 9-5.)

The humor, of course, is in how someone who picked the name "Masamune" for himself then went and named his character "Kusanagi". I think he's yankin' everyone's chain with the 'Jane Excalibur' explanation.

The early 2000s makes the name work, I suppose.

Using 'O-' as a prefix generally denotes respect. Japanese is a language with several levels of register depending on how much respect you are showing, and this is in addition to the historical baggage its writing system has. There are very specific rules on how to use 'O-' and the similar 'Go-', but in the case of the moon it's sometimes called 'Otsuki-sama', and this is much more a festival/tradition thing than anything mythological. It humanizes the moon without anthropomorphizing it, if that makes any sense? Ever read The Giving Tree? So, that's half of the joke.

The other half is in how there used to be a minor thing where you'd give a child - a girl specifically - some jesting respect by taking the '-ko' ('child') suffix off their name and replacing it with the 'O-' prefix when addressing them informally. In Tsukiko's case, this would make her 'O-tsuki'. Now, don't misunderstand - actually doing this is old-fashioned and not in any way "traditional", so the only reason to do it nowadays is as a joke. (It's basically the ancestor to adding '-chan' to someone's name.) As far as I know, it's only done with '-ko', and so was only done with women. That's the quick explanation; go take three quarters of 400-level Japanese for the long explanation.

The really quick explanation? Only her best friends get to call her that, and everyone involved has to be a half-pint into happy-drunk.

...The problem with those As Long as It Sounds Foreign names is that the silliness inherent in them is lost when everyone else has similarly silly names. It's a world where a Maurice Micklewhite wouldn't have to change their name, where everything is forcibly flattened down into onomastical equality a la Harrison Bergeron - and it is such a deviation from realism and the human condition that I personally can't stand using it in my own writing except in parody.

Code Geass got away with it by having flashy physics-breaking mecha to force the show into a genre where it's commonly done. I suspect even the great Dave Evilmurderingbastardballs would have some trouble being taken seriously, and that's after he's done something - and survived it! - to earn a two-rank promotion.

edited 16th Mar '16 8:17:35 PM by DeusDenuo

Well, in Dave's case I'd imagine it's an epithet given to him by grizzled mercenaries who speak in hushed whispers about the most evil bastard who ever lived, and that his real name is never spoken aloud. Or something like that .

I get the O-Tsuki thing now, though the moon festival thing was a little weird. Could it also be used as a form of mean-spirited sarcasm? As in, would it be realistic for some bitchy classmates to take the piss out of her somewhat archaic name by calling her that? I'm not sure sarcasm works the way I assume it does in Japanese.

Is 'Yamikawa' as weird sounding as, say, Claire Stanfield, Light Yagami, L.Lawliet, Beyond Birthday (?!?), Train Heartnet, Marvel Frozen ("you must be an American!"), and Satellizer El Bridget? Because those are all properly screwed up names that often don't even remotely resemble the language they're supposedly from (and yeah, I was picking on Death Note quite a bit there, but come on, Beyond Fucking Birthday?? Jeezus), or completely screw up the gender of the names. I was always going to go with a mild Luke Nounverber vibe with the surname, but aside from using a noun in place of an adjective (which I realise may be completely against the rules Japanese names are constructed by, but screw it) it's constructed like an actual surname and not just a jumble of vaguely Japanese sounding syllables. Given that it's a deliberate in-universe reference to the family's demonic bloodline, which was exactly the kind of name I wanted to use, and that it's not preceded by an equally preposterous given name (yes, I did consider the implications of going completely overboard and arriving at something analogous to Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way), I don't think it's completely absurd in the context of the story I'm trying to tell. But then, my ears are English, so what sounds perfectly reasonable to me may sound as equally ridiculous as Bluesharp Babysplit (seriously, wtf is with Death Note?) does to everyone.

Basically, given everything I've explained, will it work as a surname and not sound completely fucked up? Moderately strange is completely fine with me.

Also, thanks for taking the time to actually advise me on this. While I'm dead set on using 'Yamikawa' as a surname, actually discussing how strange it sounds to actual Japanese speakers has given me a fair bit of insight as to how the Japanese naming structure actually works.

EDIT: Oh god, I just went and checked out the page for Another Note. There's a guy called - wait for it.... BACKYARD BOTTOMSLASH. That... kinda sounds like it means buggery to my ears. What the hell was the author smoking. Just.... wow.

Now I feel perfectly justified naming a character whatever the hell I want!

EDIT EDIT: Turns out Backyard Bottomslash is actually a woman. That just makes it weirder.

edited 16th Mar '16 9:29:59 PM by OmegaKross

You could make her part of the Tsuchimikado clan, descents of the onmyōji Abe no Seimei. Either for irony, or the fact Seimei's mother might have been a kitsune.

Nah, I'll be doing my own thing. The family are descendants of a Demonhost - the original matriarch was possessed by a Greater Demon of Sin (demons can't reproduce with humans normally so they need to possess a human body first) and then went on to have two daughters, one of whom went on to found Tsukiko's bloodline. Demonhosts are stupid powerful, more in line with the types of characters I usually write about. They're immortal, regenerate from anything but the most powerful blessed weapons, don't feel pain from anything but blessed weapons, and have a variety of other powers. As Tsukiko's family are humans with demonic blood, as opposed to having actual demons living inside them, their powers are watered down. They only live about twice as long as normal, regenerate much more slowly, feel pain normally, and overusing their demonic powers will result in their Enemy Within taking over.

That said, they're still far superior to ordinary humans. Without using any demonic powers, Tsukiko is already in Devil May Cry territory just using her base physical ability, and at 20% of her full powers (the maximum amount that she can safely use without Tsukiyomi taking over), she's about as strong and fast as Albert Wesker in his RE5 incarnation. And if Tsukiyomi takes control, she'd be... well, like Albert Wesker in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, except with darkness powered Ki attacks and demonic magic.

So yeah, already got the bloodline covered. Like I mentioned, this is still set within my usual multiverse, so the mythology is going to be all my own.

Actually, come to think of it, I need a name for the Enemy Within. Something that isn't The Shadow, for obvious reasons.

edited 19th Mar '16 2:47:26 PM by OmegaKross

How about Akumetsu for a surname?

edited 1st Apr '16 12:43:33 PM by Wasdxz

Thanks for the input, But I'm pretty well set on the name now.