f u r i g a n a

written japanese is nice and ambiguous sometimes--especially if you don't know how to pronounce it. even if you know the reading for a given kanji, it might have any number of ways it could be written--and sometimes even native japanese wouldn't be able to tell without help. that's why we have a thing called furigana.

furigana are small kana shown beside a kanji that illustrate exactly how it should be pronounced. for someone who isn't fluent in japanese or kanji, they're an invaluable translation aid. when the japanese text is written horizontally from left to right, the furigana will be shown above the kanji, whereas vertical japanese text will have the furigana to the right. furigana are usually hiragana, but in some cases (such as showing the pronunciation of a Chinese name) they will be in katakana.

on the left is an example of what kanji with furigana looks like. the kanji in question are pretty basic, but if you were a beginner at japanese and didn't know kanji, you probably wouldn't understand if you just saw 何かと思えばー. with the addition of the furigana, however, the pronunciation becomes clear to anyone with rudimentary knowledge of hiragana: nanika to omoeba.

although some manga only show furigana for the more difficult kanji (or for the first time a given kanji is used), ayashi no ceres, like yuu watase's other works, has furigana for everything. this makes it really easy to read, especially for beginners. however, it's even more useful than that--sometimes, furigana are used to explain what was actually meant when the kanji used is different. for instance, the kanji for tennyo is often used to represent ceres' name, even though 天女 would never be read as "ceres". if you were only looking at the kanji, you might have no idea what it means, or if you had some knowledge of kanji, you might surmise that the person was saying "tennyo". but a closer look at the furigana would reveal the following: セレス (ceres). This makes it clear that although the person might be saying "tennyo", he's referring to ceres in particular.

similarly, furigana will also sometimes be used the other way around--to show what was said out loud (usually in a language other than japanese, like english), while the kanji show the meaning behind that. you'll see this a lot when people talk to kagami--the furigana say チーフ (chief), but the kanji shown (for the benefit of the japanese readers) is 主任 (shunin), which loosely means "person in charge".

finally, furigana are used very commonly to show the pronunciation of a japanese person's name--even in manga that rarely have furigana, the pronunciation of a name is usually shown at least the first time the name appears. this is more necessary than it might sound--because of the fact that most kanji can be pronounced more than one way, there's no easy way to know how someone's name might be pronounced without furigana or another pronunciation aid. for example, let's take tooya's name: 十夜. 十 can be pronounced juu, ji, ju, too, and to, among others. 夜 can be pronounced ya, yo, or yoru. it's a matter of simple math to see that there are dozens of possible ways to pronounce even a simple name like tooya's, let alone something like 渡瀬悠宇 (yuu watase).