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I doubt if this bothered anyone (except me) but I had made a mistake in saying that Aki's name (秋) meant "springtime." That was a slip-up on my part, that word and that kanji actually means "autumn" or "fall." Maybe implying something about her impending death? At any rate it is a great example of the picturesque imagery in these Chinese characters. Fall is when the leaves turn red and yellow. The first element in the kanji is a plant (I think of it as a tree but really it means "wheat") and the second is "fire" -- so it should be easy to remember that the leaves turn the colors of fire in the fall...
I think that one reason why they have kept the kanji in Japanese is exactly this, the associations are often downright poetic -- the way you have to think to remember what these tiny pictures actually mean.
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