Hi, uh, I came by to check to make sure that you'd made your changes to Walking With Ghosts in the original post (http://flonnebonne.livejournal.com/14343.html), so that I know I'm reading the right thing for iHikago (if it is right, it's just about finished :D), but then I saw this and had a serious "HEY, I KNOW THAT ONE, PICK ME" moment. (I think I have temporarily regressed back to my ten year-old self. >_>)

harumi is partially right, in that the names Akira and Hikaru can have multiple kanji combinations that have different meanings. The main reason that some characters in manga end up with names in katakana though, is because manga like Hikaru No Go (at least in Japan) are primarily aimed towards the Shounen Jump-reading audience and some of the kids in that crowd can be very young. Complicated kanji leads to little kids getting the wrong meaning and possibly the wrong pronunciation. The last thing manga-ka want is to have a significant portion of their audience calling the main characters by the wrong names. Katakana makes things very simple for them.

Of course, I can't verify this 100%, but I've read that CLAMP had this issue with Kodansha when they started Card Captor Sakura, which was their first (and arguably their only) kid-targeted work.

So after barging in on a month old post for that totally off-topic discourse, can I be sure that the version I linked above is the version you would prefer to be read for iHikago?