Why "Yukigami"?

Why have I become Yukigami?
Well, it is my best and newest transformation! It is also my final one.
Ohohoho ~ ~ I am in my final form

Well, for a short time before, I tried going with "Yukio" as my online alias, a name I'd first heard from the Beck anime. I had also assigned the name to a protagonist in one of my planned stories, so apparently I thought it was a pretty cool name. Considering this, it is as though the "yuki" from my new name was derived from that.

The "gami", which is in this case "kami" but pronounced "gami" when conjoined with a prefix such as "yuki", means "god" - and joined together as "Yukigami", the name means "Snow God."

Although the first thing most people with any familiarity with Japanese would think when they hear the name or see it romanized is "snow god", or in other words "god of snow", there are other possible interpretations, which lead to other ways of writing it if using kanji rather than kana. For example, "kami" could come from the Japanese verb for "bite", like how the "amagami" in Amagami SS (a popular slice-of-life school romance anime) means something along the lines of "gentle bite", which I assume to have playful, mildly sexual connotations.

However, "snow bite" doesn't make too much sense, does it? Unless maybe we connect its meaning with wolves - like a lone wolf, an animal in the snow, or a symbol of the Canadian tundra. It could also relate to ice-blue eyes, or one who is good with animals (a slight stretch unless grouped with the other meanings). In my case, all of these interpretations are relevant in at least a slight, but somewhat ambiguous way. One more way of interpreting "snow bite" could be a double-meaning play on "gami" using the meanings of "god" and "bite" at the same time, although I am a wolf god of the tundra, or regardless a representation of Canada - the God of Canada! I am a lone wolf of the snow that acts as the god representative of Canada in a worldly conference of national deities.

If interpreted as "snow" and "hair", it could imply that my hair, relative to the Japanese whose anime culture has had extremely heavy influences on my writing or to the East Asian people with whom I tend to typically associate, is much ligher - like snow in comparison. "Gaijin from the land of snow with his light, snowy hair."

The "snow" aspect of "Yukigami" emphasizes my love of what's blue, what's cold, wet, beautiful, or calm, but can also symbolically represent stoicism in that snow represents calm and even the death or containment of life; snow represents coldness - like cold rationality - and "god" in the Japanese sense of "a god", that is, one of many existing deities, represents an existence high enough to be snow's origin, but also something inhuman, which adds additional emphasis too on the elements of calmness, rationality, stoicism, and the like. From that line of thought, we can then also relate these things to magic, special power, wisdom, deep insight, and so on and so forth.

As one more way of stretching our scope of interpretations, maybe we could say that paper (also "kami") is already white, and if it is made beautiful by having beautiful things written onto it, its white aspect could be glorified to "snow". This may be going too far, but hey, it's fun! "kami" can also mean "nose" ... So that's four different readings of "kami" we've covered!

All in all, "Snow God" seems the best interpretation, but I would like to suggest that perhaps ALL of the interpretations could apply at once. After all, a snow god could be a wolf, could be Canadian, could harbour all of those aforementioned person qualities, and could have white, snow-coloured fur (hence "Yukigami").

"Yukigami" sounds like a real Japanese last name, and doesn't it have a certain elegance to it? :)

 

~Yukigami