What's up with males named Miyuki?

Question

Edit 1: It's like A Boy Named Sue or something.

Edit 2: Should I split this question into 2 posts so I can accept both answers? Huhuhu. I think I'll just accept 1 and bounty the other. It's a punishment for myself for not splitting up the post.

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I notice in Kaguya-sama, the name of the male protagonist is 'Miyuki', namely 白銀 御行, Shirogane Miyuki.

Apparently, the names of some of the characters in the anime/manga come from The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter where there's a male character there named 'Miyuki', namely Ōtomo no Miyuki (大納言大伴御行).

So we can see the kanji 御行 in both the Miyuki from Kaguya-sama and the Miyuki from The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. Consistent, but...

1. ...what's up with that? How can males be named Miyuki?

2. Actually, when I plug the kanji into nihongodera or google translate, what I get is, resp, Ōtomo onkō and Ō tomo on kō. There doesn't seem to be any 'miyuki' here. What's going on?

Answer 1

みゆき as a masculine name is rare but not totally unheard of.

Here's an example: 戸部{とべ}実之{みゆき}

You are not alone in thinking みゆき sounds very feminine. Apparently it sounds feminine to a lot of native Japanese ears too. The answerers here seem to unanimously consider みゆき a girl's name.

Answer 2

Partial answer, addressing #2 in the question post. :)

NihongoDera is not the best resource for names, which tend to have dedicated kanji readings that don't always match the usual on or kun.

You might have better luck with the ENAMDICT dictionary (the name-focused side of WWWJDIC), such as this mirror at Monash University:

• http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?2MUJ御行

Change the string at the end of the URL to look up a different name, by kanji, kana, or romaji. Change the number 2 just after the ? question mark to 1 to look up regular words. Or just use the website UI. :)

Name entries tend to have codes added in parentheses to the left of each romaji reading. The entry above, with that code highlighted, looks like:

The (u) here is the code. The Dictionary Codes section of the help page, more specifically the Names Dictionary Codes sub-section (scroll down a bit -- it's not possible to link to that directly, unfortunately), explains what these mean. According to the table there, the u code stands for "(as-yet) unclassified" -- as compared to s for surnames, or g for a given name that isn't yet classed by gender, or f for female given names, or m for male given names, etc.

Happy researching!

Answer 3

Oh wait a new chapter of Kaguya-sama Chapter 264 was released on May 26, 2022 (last month and about 2 months after my post).

I knew something was up!