My current character names are Yoshiko, Kuro and Kai. I'll stick to those since other characters haven't been introduced yet. I started Nocturne 21 when I was a dumb angsty kid, almost 20 years ago and pulled random names off of anime credits. They've been changed or altered since, because a lot of them didn't make sense.
Kuro's name was originally a longer version of a name I made up that doesn't actually exist in Japan. When I got to the point in my story when I was actually putting thought into it and doing research, I shortened his name to Kuro. In reality the name "Kuro" isn't conventionally used by itself for a name, but it's popular enough in anime that it's not really an issue. There's not a ton of Kanji used for Kuro as a name, but I found one that means "expert" and I liked that for him.
Yoshiko was originally Yoshiro, but Yoshiro is typically a boy's name, which I didn't realize until like 11 years into my story. So that got changed. Yoshiko is currently spelled with the Kanji for "fragrant child" but I might change my mind on that because I'm indecisive, lol.
My MC is "Kai" which is not his real name. It's the name his new family gives him since he can't remember his real name. His name was very difficult to come with and I only came up with it a few months ago. Again, I've been working on this story for 19 years and It's really hard to just give him a new name when I've been calling him something else for two decades. I ended up liking Kai because it has different meanings in several different languages. What sealed it though was there's a character in The Snow Queen named Kai (might have a different pronounciation though) and the character is a young boy who loses who he is when infected by a demonic mirror shard. Since my character loses his identity and since there is a very heavy theme of glass in my story, it kind of seemed perfect. Also Kai's first action when he wakes up is to break a mirror which ended up being a happy coincidence.