PRAISE FOR A MAN

“Hirano has continued to grapple with new themes ever since his debut. In
this work, he has arrived at the primal question of what validates human
existence.”
—Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police

“A riveting examination of desire and identity, A Man patiently unpicks the

nature of unfulfilled aspirations. Keiichiro Hirano has written a
multilayered tale of human reinvention, at once eminently readable and
deeply moving.”
—Tash Aw, author of The Harmony Silk Factory and Five
Star Billionaire

“There is no doubt that Keiichiro Hirano is an author with an extremely

pioneering and modern spirit. His works have opened up a very imaginative
space in analyzing and exploring the spiritual world of humanity.”
—Sheng Keyi, author of Northern Girls and Death Fugue
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events,
and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual
events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2018 by Keiichiro Hirano

Translation copyright © 2020 by Eli K. P. William
All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission
of the publisher.

Previously published as Aru Otoko in the magazine Bungakukai and then in

book form by Bungeishunju in Japan in 2018. Translated from the Japanese
by Eli K. P. William. First published in English by Amazon Crossing in
2020.

Published by Amazon Crossing, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Crossing are trademarks of

Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 9781542006880 (hardcover)

ISBN-10: 1542006880 (hardcover)

ISBN-13: 9781542006873 (paperback)

ISBN-10: 1542006872 (paperback)

Cover design by David Drummond

First edition
 CONTENTS

PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
 PROLOGUE

The protagonist of this story is someone that I have been fondly calling
“Kido-san.” You may be wondering where the fondness comes in, as using
a family name with the addition of “san” isn’t always the warmest way to
address someone, but I think you will soon understand why I hesitate to call
him anything else.
I first met Kido-san on my way back from a talk at a bookstore. My
head was buzzing after having spoken continuously for two and a half hours
and, wanting to settle down somewhat before returning home, I had stopped
in at a certain drinking establishment that I happened to stumble upon.
Kido-san was drinking alone at the bar.
At first I listened vaguely as he chatted with the bartender. But at some
juncture, I couldn’t help but laugh and found myself joining the
conversation.
The initial introduction he gave me—his name, his background—I
would soon learn was all lies. But as I had no reason to doubt him then, I
believed every word.
Wearing square black-rimmed glasses, the man wasn’t what you
would call strikingly handsome, but his face had a certain air of
sophistication that went well with a dim bar. I thought to myself that if I had
looks like his, I might remain attractive well into middle age, even if I were
to develop a few more wrinkles and gray hairs. But when I told him so, he
merely cocked his head to the side with an expression of disbelief and said,
“No, not at all . . .”
I told him I was a novelist. He hadn’t heard of me and seemed
embarrassed by that fact, which made me ashamed in turn, an all-too-
common occurrence. But he had a profound interest in my profession, and
after interrogating me about various details, something like admiration
suddenly filled his face, and he said, “I’m sorry.” I frowned, unsure why he
was apologizing, when he told me that his real name was Akira Kido,
thereby admitting that the name he had just told me was a false one. He
then asked that I keep this secret from the bartender and went on to explain
that he was a lawyer, born in the same year that I was, 1975.
Having once been a, shall we say, less-than-studious law school
student, I often feel self-conscious when faced with a bona fide legal expert.
But after his confession, I felt no such drop in stature, as the personal
history he had until then claimed as his own had been unfortunate enough to
arouse my sympathy.
His behavior struck me as tasteless, and I asked him what he was
doing telling such lies. This left him searching for words with a pensive
frown.
“I keep myself together by living other people’s pain,” he said
eventually with an indescribably lonesome smile. “It’s like the expression
‘the man who goes mummy hunting ends up a mummy himself . . .’ Do you
understand what it’s like to be honest through lies? I mean, of course, just
for brief stints at places like this. Somehow I can’t seem to let go of myself
entirely.
“What I truly want is to think directly about myself, but that just
makes me sick. It’s the one thing I can’t help. I’ve done everything I can.
And I believe that soon enough my need to act like this will pass—I never
would have guessed things would turn out like this . . .”
I was put off by his intentionally mysterious way of speaking but
found the content of what he had told me fascinating. Moreover, I could not
deny my budding affection for the man.
“But to you,” Kido-san continued, “I will tell the truth from now on.”
Aside from this initial exchange revolving around his lie, Kido-san
was an unaffected, affable, collected person. He had a sensitive and
receptive mind, and in his every word one could sense a character of great
depth and complexity.
I felt comfortable talking with him. Whatever I wanted to get across
he understood well, and his meaning in turn was as clear as day to me. We
also found commonality in our love for music. I appreciated how rare it was
to come across someone like this, and I sensed that there had to be
extenuating circumstances that explained his need to lie.
The next time I visited that bar on the same night of the week, Kido-
san was drinking alone again as I’d expected, and I sat down beside him at
his invitation, in a seat somewhat removed from the bartender’s post. A
number of times afterward, we shared each other’s company in those same
seats and grew intimate enough that we would talk late into the night.
His drink of choice was vodka. Despite his lean build, he could
definitely hold his liquor and would claim to be pleasantly tipsy even
though he never seemed to change, his tone of voice remaining always
composed.
The two of us became something like friends. Making a new drinking
buddy with whom you form a deep connection is surprisingly rare in middle
age. But our relationship was limited to the counter of that establishment,
and neither of us sought the other’s contact information. He probably felt
uncomfortable asking. For my part, the truth is that I was still wary of him.
In fact, I have not seen him in quite some time and doubt that I ever will
again. His no longer visiting that bar—no longer feeling the need to do so—
I interpret as a positive sign.

Novelists, whether consciously or unconsciously, are always on the lookout

for people that can serve as models for their novels. That is, we eagerly
await the serendipity of someone like Meursault or Holly Golightly
appearing out of the blue one day.
For a person to be appropriate to serve as such a model, he or she
needs to be highly out of the ordinary while possessing something that
might be seen as a kind of template for humanity or for the age and must be
purified via fiction until they reach the dimension of the symbol.
When I hear the stories of people who have lived dramatic and
tumultuous lives, I think to myself that they might work as novels. Some of
these individuals even encourage me by way of subtle circumlocution, as if
to say, “You can use me if you want, you know.” Yet whenever I give
serious consideration to writing such ostentatious yarns, I find myself
balking, though I suppose my novels might sell better if only I could go
through with it.
Where I usually find my models is among the people I already know.
Since I try to associate as little as possible with those who don’t interest me,
everyone that I maintain a long relationship with has a certain something.
And sometimes I am astonished to discover all of a sudden that one of them
is the protagonist of my next novel for whom I was searching all along.
Individuals such as these, about whom my understanding slowly deepens
over time, are ideal for full-length novels, since the protagonist is together
with the reader for the long haul.

Starting the second time I met him, Kido-san gradually began to explain the
reason he had used a fake name, and it turned out to be a very intricate story
indeed. I found myself utterly captivated, often keeping my arms crossed as
I considered what he told me carefully, and soon grasped why he had
wanted to divulge it to me. While he may never have actually said, “You
can use me if you want,” the proposition was surely on his mind. But my
decision to actually do so didn’t come about until after I happened to meet a
lawyer elsewhere that knew him well.
“He’s a great man,” this lawyer said without hesitation, “and
incredibly kind to people of all stripes. Like taxi drivers. If they don’t know
the route, he tells them with such warmth and care it’s amazing.”
I laughed, but had to agree that it was an admirable quality in this day
and age—and in a rich man to boot!
The other stories this lawyer related were surprising, involving as they
did a number of moving incidents about which Kido-san himself had never
spoken, and I finally came to understand in full living color this
unmistakably isolated and lonely middle-aged man. It might sound trite, but
he was, after all, a real character.
In writing this novel, I spoke again with the lawyer and other
concerned parties, investigated for myself various details that Kido-san had
left vague in the interest of confidentiality, embellished it all with my
imagination, and made it into fiction. I doubt Kido-san would have ever
disclosed so much of what he had learned on the job to anyone, but I
followed through with what the novel required.

With all the unique characters that make an appearance, some of you might
wonder why on earth I didn’t pick one of the bit players to be the
protagonist. While Kido-san will in fact become obsessed with the life of a
man, it is in Kido-san, viewed from behind as he chases this man, that I
sensed something that needed to be seen.
There’s a painting by René Magritte entitled Not to Be Reproduced in
which a man with his back turned is looking into a mirror at the back of
another version of himself inside the mirror, who is likewise looking into
the depths of the reflection. This story is similar in some ways. And perhaps
the reader will spot the central theme of this work in the back of me, the
artist, obsessing over Kido-san absorbed in his own obsession.
What’s more, you may take issue with this prologue and doubt that the
man I met at the bar was really “Kido-san” to begin with. That is perfectly
understandable, but personally I believe he is who he says he is.
It would seem natural to begin the story with him, but before that I
would like to write about a woman named Rié. For you see, the
bewilderingly strange and tragic ordeals that she underwent are where
everything in this tale finds its origin.
 CHAPTER ONE

It was in mid-September 2011 that news spread among the people of a

certain Town S that the husband of Rié from the stationery shop had passed
away.
While everyone in Japan associates 2011 with the Great East Japan
Earthquake, there are some in Town S, tucked away in the center of
Miyazaki Prefecture, for whom this death of no national significance holds
a more prominent place in their recollections. It was not uncommon for
those residing in the small, rustic community of around thirty thousand,
Rié’s mother among them, to never have met anyone from the devastated
Tohoku region.
Looking at a map, one finds a thoroughfare of some antiquity called
Mera Road cutting through the middle of town along its course over the
Kyushu Mountains to its eventual terminus in Kumamoto. Visiting in
person, one discovers a settlement of simple appearance, about a forty-
minute drive from Miyazaki City to the southeast.
Town S is undoubtedly a place of many unique qualities. For ancient
history buffs, its name reportedly conjures the enormous burial mounds
within its precincts, while fans of professional baseball recognize it as the
site of one team’s spring camp and dam aficionados for its boasting the
largest in Kyushu. Like a good local, Rié never had much interest in any of
this. Though she would, nonetheless, develop a sentimental attachment to a
certain cherry tree in the park with the burial mounds.
Upon the release of a documentary in 2007 about a secluded mountain
village that was abandoned en masse in the 1980s after severe depopulation
left it difficult to sustain, a certain kind of tourist began to descend on Town
S. Previously unknown in these parts, they would waltz about with a
condescending air, possessive of a perverse fascination with ghost towns.
While the center of Town S flourished after it was redeveloped during
the economic bubble of the Showa era, the combination of a low birth rate
and aging population left many businesses on the main shopping stretch
along Mera Road permanently shuttered, earning it the rueful nickname
“Showa Burial Mound.” One of the few shops that remained was Rié’s
family business, Seibundo Stationery.

Rié’s late husband, Daisuké Taniguchi, moved to town just before the
documentary began to generate buzz. Wanting to start a career in forestry at
the age of thirty-five without any experience in the industry, he found
employment at Ito Lumber, and after working there for four years with
enough diligence to earn the admiration of the company president, he was
crushed by a cryptomeria tree that he himself had felled and there met his
end. His age at time of death was thirty-nine.
Daisuké was a reticent man. As he hardly spoke to any of his
coworkers and had no friends of note, the only townspeople that learned the
details of his past were Rié and her family. One might even call him an
enigma, though it wasn’t unusual for migrants to depopulating areas to have
issues about which they could not speak. What set Daisuké apart was that,
within a single year of his arrival, he had married one of the locals: Rié
from the stationery shop.
Rié was the only daughter of the proprietors of a stationery shop that
had been in the family since her grandfather’s generation and was known by
everyone in town. While somewhat eccentric, she was thought to be
sensible and trustworthy. So, although her decision aroused universal
surprise, everyone assumed that a woman like Rié would only have decided
to tie the knot after thoroughly sussing Daisuké out and concluding that he
presented no harm. This was enough to bring all prying into his past to an
indeterminate hiatus.
Ito, president of Ito Lumber, was pleased by the development, as it
raised the likelihood that Daisuké, who had far exceeded his expectations,
might stay permanently. At the same time, officials in charge of migration
between urban and rural areas at the town office treated the union as an
ideal case study.

In part due to his being Rié’s husband, no one ever had bad things to say
about Daisuké Taniguchi. On the contrary, even hinting at ill-intentioned
gossip would provoke disapproval, and most of the townspeople were quick
to defend him. One might even go so far as to call him cherished.
Better described as introverted than standoffish, Daisuké wasn’t the
type to go out of his way to socialize, but if someone struck up a
conversation with him, he would engage them with surprising cheerfulness.
He had a distinctive, laid-back air about him, and Ito would often cross his
arms and say, “Now that man is going places.”
While Daisuké was never angry, sulky, or otherwise in bad temper, he
wasn’t afraid to speak up, albeit gently, about inefficiency and danger in his
work. Occupational accidents are an all-too-frequent occurrence on logging
sites, and talk has an unfortunate tendency to be gruff and dire. Somehow,
the mere presence of this newbie reduced conflict.
They say it takes approximately three years for a forester to come into
their own, beginning with chainsaw felling and moving on to the operation
of processors and grapples. Daisuké was a reliable hand within a year and a
half. A prudent judge of circumstances, steadfast, and both physically and
psychologically healthy, he poured himself quietly into his work, whether
under the scorching sun of midsummer or the sleet of a chilly winter day,
and completed his tasks so utterly without complaint that experienced site
supervisors would often advise him to pipe up if he was uncomfortable.
It can be hard to predict the capabilities of a new hire until they are
actually put to the test, but Ito bragged on a number of occasions to others
in the industry about what a find Daisuké turned out to be and tended to
attribute his exemplary performance to his university degree. In the whole
history of Ito Lumber, going back three generations, there had never been
another employee like him.
After Daisuké’s death, neighbors who had known Rié for many years
expressed their sympathy by saying of her, “That girl is badly marked . . .”
To be “badly marked” means to be unfortunate. Apparently, this is
something of an anachronism, but the phrase remains in use in the
Kyushuian vernacular. It is often intoned by elders with intense
commiseration derived from reflection on their long life experience. None
of which is to imply that the people of Kyushu have exceptionally bad luck
or that they are especially fatalistic.
Misfortune can visit itself upon anyone. But when it comes to serious
misfortune, we have a tendency to presume that, if it happens at all, it can
only happen once in a lifetime. The fortunate imagine this to be so out of a
certain kind of naivety. Those who have actually experienced misfortune
pray for it to be so as a desperate wish. And yet, the sort of major
misfortune for which once is plenty, sadly, has something in common with
the stray dog that persistently chases the same person around, twice and
then thrice. It is in the midst of such recurrent misfortune that people visit
shrines for purification ceremonies or have their names changed.
Including Daisuké, Rié lost three of the people she most loved one
after the next.
Rié was raised in Town S and lived in her family home until leaving
after high school graduation to attend university in Kanagawa Prefecture.
There she found a steady job and, at the age of twenty-five, married her first
husband, an assistant at an architecture firm. Their first son was named
Yuto, and their second, Ryo.
At the age of two, Ryo was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died six
months later. This was the first deep sorrow Rié had ever experienced.
Rié and her husband fought over Ryo’s treatment, and she was never
able to put the hurt she suffered in the process behind her. At her husband’s
insistence that they forge onward as a family, she could only shake her
head. Their divorce mediation lurched from argument to argument, and it
took eleven months for them to reach an agreement. Thanks to the efforts of
a capable lawyer, Rié managed to secure custody of their remaining child,
which had been a sticking point for her husband in the negotiations. Then a
vitriolic postcard arrived from her in-laws, with whom she had always been
on good terms, denouncing her as “inhuman.”
 Just as the dust was settling, her own father suddenly died, prompting
Rié to return with Yuto to her family home in Town S.
Her predicament aroused great pity as the townspeople had all been
fond of Rié since she was a child, remembering her as a well-behaved little
darling. A lovely, subdued, petite girl with the sort of eyes that seem to
harbor idiosyncratic thoughts, her friends would often tease her about the
faraway look that appeared on her face whenever her mind wandered.
While she wasn’t exactly an overachiever, Rié had good grades, and
when her friends learned that she would begin commuting to a university
prep school in Miyazaki City an hour away by bus instead of to their local
high school, they took it as a matter of course. Despite the fact that she
wasn’t the most talkative student, there were two or three boys every school
year, in both junior high and high school, who watched her in the hallways
or classroom, nursing a secret crush.
Her parents were immensely proud of their only daughter, who had
graduated from university in the big city of Yokohama, married a man on
track to be an architect, and even been blessed with children. One would
have been hard pressed to find anyone who looked upon that joyful face of
hers with anything like bitterness or contempt.
In other words, Rié’s life fell far short of how everyone imagined it
would turn out. No one—not the grown-ups, not her old classmates—had
doubted for a second that she was happy, so when the townspeople heard
that she had lost a young child, gotten a divorce, and returned home, their
reaction did not stop at mere sympathy; they were profoundly disturbed by
the injustice of it all. That the world in which they lived was the sort of
place where such things could happen was an unsettling idea. When on top
of all this she lost her second partner after only three years and nine months
of marriage, it’s hardly surprising that they would say nothing to demean
the memory of Daisuké, if for no other reason than that he was Rié’s
husband.

When Rié met Daisuké, she had taken over management of the stationery
shop from her mother. Delivering office supplies to her old middle school,
the town office, local corporations, and other customers; seeing to the
checkout counter; and fulfilling the various tasks required, Rié watched
each day pass in a blur. While she found some consolation in familiar faces,
it was less stressful to deal with new clients. Of these they had no shortage,
thanks to their serving as a distributor for a mail-order company since the
days her father was in charge.
As soon as Rié was alone, she thought of the son she had lost and
often cried. She could never forget the time, perhaps one month before he
died, when she’d left his ward to talk with the doctor and returned to find
him staring quietly at the ceiling. What could he be thinking and feeling?
she wondered as she studied him in profile. The capacity for thought he had
been endowed with was supposed to have served him in leading his life for
many decades more. Instead it was functioning merely to recognize his
impending doom. But there was just no way he could possibly understand
the terrible process occurring in his body, not even at the bitter end . . .
Whenever Rié recalled Ryo at that moment, she lost even the power to
stand, sitting down wherever she happened to be and covering her face.
Inevitably, her thoughts would turn to Yuto, the growing son that had
been left to her, and she would remind herself to continue on as cheerfully
as she could. Lacking the maturity to be troubled by his brother’s death,
Yuto had grown into an unexpectedly energetic boy since Rié’s return, and
this was her one solace.
She also remembered her father. Not once in his life had he ever raised
his voice to her or stopped loving her with everything he had.
Rié had no faith in any particular religion. Her family were so-called
“funeral Buddhists,” belonging to the Jodo sect only insofar as they
employed its funerary services. Nevertheless, she often imagined her father
as a kindly old man watching over Ryo in heaven, and this never failed to
bring her a touch of relief.
“Father only went to heaven a little bit early to keep Ryo company,”
drawled her mother, who truly believed such things. “He followed after that
boy so as he won’t worry till you’re ready to go yourself. That’s Father,
alright.”
Living in her hometown for the first time since high school fourteen years
earlier was the source of some comfort for Rié. But sometimes, when idling
at her desk in the shop, she was beset by a feeling of emptiness so powerful,
she worried for her own well-being. Her moorings to the world came loose,
time slipping by insensibly around her. Then suddenly, like long-sunken
garbage bobbing up inexplicably from the bottom of a pond, the thought
would come to her that maybe death wasn’t that scary after all. I mean, if
such a small child as Ryo could go through it, then why not her? And
wasn’t her father waiting patiently with him on the other side . . . ?
Whenever she caught herself thinking this way, the core of her body would
fill with the luminous chill of dread.
For the first while after her return, Rié looked with envy at the social
media pages of her friends from her university days. But after taking a
break for a week, she was surprised to find that her interest in the interplay
of text and photos was gone.
Visitors to the shop were scant. It was their mail-order clients that
supported Rié’s life with her son and mother. The future of the family
business was not looking bright.
She had seen the main street lined with shuttered stores on her annual
visits for New Year’s and the Obon Festival. But it wasn’t until she resettled
permanently that the town began to make her feel lonesome, as though she
had been abandoned alone in a big, empty, dilapidated house.
On the second floor of a building across the street from the shop was
the piano studio where she had studied for eight years. It was now deserted,
the building utterly neglected. The town lacked even the young people to
spray-paint it with graffiti.
Once a week, Rié had crossed the street for her lesson and then
returned to the shop, where she did homework while waiting for her father
to finish work. The ride back to their nearby home, with her sitting shotgun
while her father drove, just the two of them, she now looked back on with
fierce longing . . .
Could I start fresh in Yokohama or another area around Tokyo? Or
how about somewhere closer like Hakata? Maybe I could go look for a new
job there? Such thoughts crossed her mind from time to time. She could
never be bothered to even reach out and touch them, leaving them instead to
simply fade away.
It was in the February of the year after Rié’s return that Daisuké first visited
Seibundo Stationery.
That winter, Rié and Yuto had both come down with colds twice.
Although Town S was supposed to be much warmer than Yokohama, Rié
had gotten used to living in a modern condo, and her drafty family home
was simply too much for her, especially the frigid bathing room. It had been
up to her mother, the only one in the family who remained well, to take care
of them on both occasions.
Rié had just recovered from one of these colds when Daisuké stepped
into the shop alone. It was evening, around the time that children come to
buy pens and notebooks on their way home from school. Darkness had
fallen already, and Rié was just then considering letting her mother take
over so she could go home to make dinner.
Especially given the dearth of customers, it was hard not to notice an
unfamiliar man around Rié’s age. Also conspicuous were the sketchbook
and watercolor set he brought to the counter along with a planner. Skinny,
he was just tall enough that Rié with her small stature had to look up at him
slightly and, dressed plainly in a navy-blue windbreaker and jeans, he gave
the vague impression of not being from around there.
As she was peeling off the planner’s price tag for him, Rié imagined
this man starting a new life in the town and wondered what would compel
him to do so. Any of the townspeople surely would have been just as
curious. When he left the store, she said thank you for the second time and,
with her eyes on his back as he walked away, inexplicably sensed a life
teeming with stories that needed to be told.

Before a month had elapsed, Daisuké visited the store again. It had been
raining torrentially since morning, and an old acquaintance of Rié’s
mother’s, Okumura-san, had just stopped by, carrying some bamboo shoots
to while away the time.
“Go ahead,” said Rié, as Daisuké was making his way timidly toward
the counter to buy a sketchbook and a small amount of paint as before.
 “Oh, I’m very sorry, young man,” said Okumura-san. “Looks like I’m
in your way.”
When she stepped aside, Daisuké gave a slight bow and put his items
on the counter.
“That is some storm,” said Okumura-san, trying to make conversation.
“Yes.” Daisuké gave a faint smile. His white car was parked in front of
the store.
“Do you need a receipt?” Rié asked.
“Um . . . I’m fine,” Daisuké replied, lowering his head. Then, with
palpable self-consciousness, he straightened up abruptly and looked Rié
straight in the eye for a moment.
Rié opened her eyes wide, as though she had just been addressed. But
Daisuké merely averted his gaze without a word, gave another slight bow,
and left the shop, driving off into the downpour.

From then on, this nameless customer visited the shop about once a month,
usually in the evening. Invariably he purchased painting supplies and
sketchbooks, only the large A3 size at first, then the little A5 ones as well.
They were the sorts of items that hardly anyone but high school art club
students wanted, so whenever Rié stocked up on inventory, he began to pop
into her head.
One of his visits was on another day of pouring rain about six months
later, when Yuto’s summer break was coming to an end. Thick turbulent
clouds blanketed the town, and Rié was repeatedly startled by ground-
rumbling booms that followed close behind lightning.
He opened the door of the shop around three o’clock. The sound of
cicadas—buzzing from the lush sidewalk trees in spite of the weather—
filled the room, along with sultry air, before both were cut off as the door
closed.
Okumura-san was sitting in a chair eating a steamed bun, absorbed in
conversation with Rié’s mother. She had stopped in not long before to
blather away while taking shelter from the rain.
“I take it art is your hobby?” Okumura-san asked Daisuké in the local
dialect as he approached the checkout counter with his usual sketchbook
and paint.
Startled, Daisuké paused before replying yes with a faint smile.
“A customer of mine says he saw you painting outdoors. On the lawn
by the Hitotsuse River? Bet you’ve built up some collection by now, huh?”
Daisuké gave only a slight nod, still smiling.
“Next time you could show them to us. What do you say? You want to
see his paintings too, don’t you, Rié?”
Rié could tell that Okumura-san wasn’t making this request purely for
curiosity’s sake. She was trying to ferret out information about this
unknown repeat customer. It reminded Rié why she’d spent her adolescence
desperate to escape this country town, as tranquil and close to her heart as it
was supposed to be.
“Okumura-san, you’re putting him on the spot,” said Rié. “Sorry about
that. Forget what she said and please come again.”
“Oh . . . It’s fine. I mean, they’re not really worth showing to anyone
. . .” Saying this, the man nodded and made his usual abrupt exit.
Okumura-san looked to Rié and her mother, giving them each a sly
smile in turn.
 CHAPTER TWO

Rié doubted that the customer would ever come again. And the thought
made her feel vaguely lonely. Not because she yearned to see him. Not at
this stage. Rather, she felt bad to think that this apparently solitary man
might leave town because of Okumura-san’s prying. It was like the sadness
of watching someone accidently knock over a fragile treasure you had
always handled with great care.
But contrary to her expectations, he returned the following week,
alone on a weekday evening as always. Her guess was that he wanted to
allay the suspicions of the townspeople.
“Here . . .” Daisuké proffered two of his sketchbooks to Rié. As he
carried them with him everywhere, the green covers were dog-eared, the
corners whitened. With no other customers in the shop and Rié’s mother
out, it was just the two of them.
“You brought these for me?” A smile spread across Rié’s face.
On the first page of the sketchbook, she opened to what appeared to be
the landscape of an island in Miyazaki City called Aoshima. Depicted were
a rocky beach nicknamed “Devil’s Washboard” with rolling terrain like
ripples on water, the gate of Aoshima Shrine, a great expanse of ocean that
seemed to perfectly reflect the blue sky stretching overhead, and the coast
in the distance.
Rié raised her head and looked at the Regular, whose name she didn’t
even know. He stood there, wearing a stiff expression. The slight quivering
of his jaw seemed to be impeding his efforts to smile.
Turning the pages, Rié found cherry trees in full bloom on a burial
mound, the dam at the edge of town, the Hitotsuse River that Okumura-san
had mentioned, a nearby park . . . The scenery captured was the sort
someone not from around there might pick out, from tourist spots to
ordinary places in which locals would have found nothing unique. Some
were black-and-white sketches while others were in color.
His drawings and paintings didn’t suggest any kind of special talent.
But they weren’t terrible either. They made Rié think of the pictures drawn
by the boy who had been the best artist in her class at middle school. For
most people, drawing pictures was something you did during arts and crafts
time until you graduated from middle school and then immediately gave it
up. His work was what you would expect from a random adult if you
handed them a paintbrush and drawing paper out of the blue, employing
technique that had not evolved since adolescence.
Yet while everyone else had stopped, for some reason this man had
kept on going. And so what if his artistic proficiency remained frozen. But
what about his level of maturity? Whether you wanted to call it growing up
or growing old, wasn’t hanging on to such innocence supposed to be against
the rules? I mean, here was a full-grown adult, probably in his mid-thirties,
around the same age as Rié herself. And he had not stopped at drawing just
one of these pure, carefree pictures for a laugh. He had gone on silently
filling whole sketchbooks with them. Rié found this deeply touching.
Was this how the world revealed itself to his eyes, so open and
unfettered? What would life be like to calmly face such a reality?
For nearly fifteen minutes, Rié took her time turning the pages, hoping
that no one would interrupt her. Right then, she didn’t want any customers
to walk in.
Eventually her gaze fell on a painting at the end of the second
sketchbook. It depicted the bus terminal she had used every day to commute
to high school in Miyazaki City. Although she had been passing by on a
regular basis again, as she was studying the picture, tears began to well up
inexplicably in her eyes, and she brushed them away in annoyance.
For a long time afterward, Rié would sometimes wonder why she had
cried at that moment. All she could think in the end was that she had been
profoundly psychologically unstable. It was as though her feelings about the
circumstances of her life, including her sadness over the deaths of Ryo and
her father, had been building up imperceptibly since her return until, with
the addition of these last trifling drops of emotion, the surface tension had
finally broken and it had all spilled out.
 In the days when she had sat each morning in the waiting room of that
bus terminal, she had never dreamed for a moment that in the future she
might find a job in Yokohama, live a married life there, lose one of the two
children she bore all too soon, split up with her husband, and return home.
And somehow, even though fifteen long years had passed, this dripping
watercolor of the bus terminal depicted the building just as it appeared
wistfully in her memory. The sole difference being that teenage Rié in her
school uniform was no longer there.
This may have all been nothing more than a fleeting thought that arose
much later, in the process of reflecting back on this event again and again.
What she experienced in the moment was something swelling within her,
filling her breast and crushing all other emotions.
“You’re very talented,” said Rié. “I’m sorry. It’s a place I know well.
It seems to have reminded me of something from long ago . . .”
She smiled and wiped her cheeks with her upturned fingers. Then,
carefully closing the sketchbook so as not to wet it, she covered her mouth
with her hand and took a few moments to regain her composure before
beaming another smile. But to her surprise, the Regular, who until then had
merely stood there in silence, was looking straight at her when tears
suddenly spilled from his reddened eyes in the same way. Frantically, he
cowered to hide his face, not so much out of shame but as though some
secret had been exposed, and fled behind a nearby shelf. When he came
back after a while with a red pen that he seemed to have picked out at
random, the tears were gone.
While Daisuké waited for her to ring him up, he kept his lips pursed
firmly. Rié too said nothing. For though she could make no sense of what
was happening, the lucid serenity revealed by the lights of the town in the
gathering dusk suffused her with tenderness, and she could not bear to
rupture that moment.

Daisuké returned a week later. Instead of calling out “welcome” as she did
with normal customers, Rié greeted him with the friendlier “good
afternoon.” Daisuké responded with a “good afternoon” of his own and,
after paying for some printing paper and other office supplies, raised his
head.
“Um . . .”
“Yes?” Rié widened her big eyes expectantly.
“If it’s not too much trouble, will you be my friend?”
“Huh? Um, OK . . .” Rié nodded, bewildered. Her chest began to throb
with a feeling that was not quite surprise and not quite joy. How long had it
been since she heard the word “friend”? It seemed like ages, but that
couldn’t be. She ought to have come across it countless times, both in
Yokohama and since her return. She had as many Facebook friends as your
average person, even if she wasn’t logging in these days, and the town
practically crawled with her childhood friends everywhere she went.
Yet, from this man’s lips, the word seemed to mean something new.
She didn’t think anyone had ever asked her so directly, not even in
childhood. Viewed objectively, it should have creeped her out coming from
someone his age. The only reason her guard didn’t immediately go up was
that she had seen those sketchbooks. But hold on, what could he have meant
by “be my friend”? It wasn’t clear to her what exactly she had consented to.
“May I ask your name?”
“I’m Daisuké Taniguchi.” Daisuké took out his business card, trying to
hide the trembling of his hands. Listed was the name of a company, Ito
Lumber, a mobile phone number, and an email address.
“Sorry, I don’t have any business cards with me at the moment, but my
name is Rié Takemoto. Here, let me write it for you.” Rié reached for a
yellow sticky note beside the cash register.
“If it’s alright with you, this Sunday, how about dinner or . . .”
“On Sunday I have to look after my son.” Rié’s tone left no room for
misunderstanding.
“Are you married?”
“I was—I got divorced, and now I’ve come back to my parents’ place
with my child.”
“I see. Sorry, I had no idea.”
“It would be pretty freaky if you did! I know we said friends, but I
can’t do anything except talk with you here—is that OK?”
“Yes, of course . . . That’s plenty.”
 “I go out on errands sometimes, but I’m in the store almost every day.
As you can see, I’ve got a lot of free time on my hands, so come by and
show me your pictures whenever you like. Don’t worry about buying
anything.”

From then on, Daisuké visited about once every ten days, and the length of
their conversations steadily grew, until before Rié knew it she was having
her mother watch the shop while she went with him for tea and other
outings. Daisuké explained that he worked in forestry. Logging sites usually
shut down before four and he was currently working on a nearby mountain,
so he always zipped over as soon as he was done.
For a time, Rié respectfully stayed off the topic of Daisuké’s past,
sensing his discomfort. But she began to pick up on what she thought were
hints that there was something he wanted her to ask him about and finally
decided to give it a try.
On the day she asked him about his past, Daisuké was off work due to
heavy rain. The two of them were having lunch at the neighborhood eel
restaurant. It was after the meal while they were drinking hot tea that
Daisuké, following a moment of hesitation, began to tell his story.
Daisuké was the second son of the owners of an inn in a hot springs
town in Gunma Prefecture called Ikaho Onsen; he had a brother who was
one year his senior. This brother was what is sometimes called a “dawdling
master.” While he wasn’t bad at heart, the knowledge that, being the first-
born son, he’d inherit the inn no matter what made him complacent. As a
result, he’d slacked off at his studies, becoming something of a hoodlum in
middle school and driving his parents out of their minds. He nonetheless
managed to get into a private university in Tokyo before studying abroad in
America for two years, but upon returning to Japan, went straight back to
the capital, where he began to run a restaurant with his friends.
As Daisuké’s mother and father both loved his brother dearly, they
persevered for a time in trying to persuade him to come home. Eventually,
though, they gave up and reluctantly decided to leave the inn to their second
son. For better or for worse, Daisuké was less adventurous than his brother
and had graduated from the economics department of a public university in
the countryside.
Once he started at his father’s company, Daisuké applied himself
diligently. He wanted nothing more than to cheer up his disappointed
parents and gradually reconciled them to the idea that they would entrust
their legacy to him. But soon Daisuké’s brother came crying to their father,
burdened with a large debt from the failure of his restaurant, and their father
agreed to pay it off only on the condition that he take over the inn. Their
mother was in full agreement, and they promised their sons that Daisuké’s
brother would one day become “managing director” while Daisuké would
be “vice president.”
Whatever their titles, Daisuké knew that he was the one who would
have to carry the business in practice. What scared him was that this
arrangement might sour his relationship with his brother. For many years,
he had struggled to understand why his parents had to love his brother so
much simply because he was the eldest male. That confusion had never
gone away. He loved his brother too. But the feeling was not entirely
mutual.
Several years later, their father was diagnosed with liver cancer at the
age of seventy-one. As the cancer was at an advanced stage, he would need
a transplant if he was going to survive, but even then, his prognosis was
poor. With no time to wait for a liver from a brain-dead donor, his one
chance was a live-donor transplant from a relative. The test results
disqualified Daisuké’s brother as he had a fatty liver. But Daisuké’s liver
was healthy. It hardly seemed fair that he would be the one called upon,
precisely because he had not lived immoderately like his brother . . .
Live liver transplantation posed a risk of lingering complications not
just for the recipient but for the donor as well. In some cases, this could
mean death. Daisuké’s father bowed to him for the first time ever and asked
him to fulfill his duty as a son while he gripped his hand and cried.
Although Daisuké’s brother and mother never said explicitly that he ought
to grant this request, they never reassured him that he was under no
obligation either, and both told him that they wanted his father to live a long
life. They made no attempt to urge his father to reconsider, and the three of
them were always having discussions when Daisuké wasn’t around. It was
awkward when Daisuké went to the hospital for a visit and walked in on
such meetings. But he understood their urgency; time was of the essence,
and he wanted his father to live out his years as much as they did.
In the end, Daisuké consented to serving as the donor. Rather than
simply capitulate to the pressure of his family, he would provide his liver of
his own free choice, without any hard feelings.
His father was overjoyed. It was the only time that he would ever say
thank you to Daisuké. His brother promised him the entire inheritance when
the time came. Their mother looked happy as well.
But sadly, his father’s cancer had progressed faster than predicted, and
while Daisuké wavered over consenting to the transplant, it had already
become too late. His father died wearing a horrendously irritated
expression, almost brimming with hatred. The three surviving family
members mourned together, but neither Daisuké’s brother nor his mother
had any kind words regarding his ultimately pointless resolution.
“As you can probably imagine, I was relieved. I wanted to save my
father’s life, but the more I looked into the procedure, the more scared I got
. . . And after his death, I realized that something inside me was broken
beyond repair. So I cut off all contact with my family and left town. I
wanted to get as far away as possible . . . I have no intention of ever seeing
them again. This is the last time I talk about my family.”
Rié listened to Daisuké’s story from start to finish without interrupting
him once. She tried to imagine what might have been going through his
mind when he came to this remote town; took up employment in, of all
things, the strenuous and hazardous forestry industry; drew pictures by
himself on his days off; and, after more than six months, finally asked Rié
to be his friend.
She sympathized with his predicament and began to feel that, as a
friend, she ought to divulge a secret of comparable weight. So she told him
that she had lost a son to disease, that a disagreement surrounding his
medical treatment had been the cause of her divorce, and that her decision
to return immediately after was due to her father’s death.
Daisuké stared at Rié without moving until she had finished, then he
lowered his head slightly and gave her three nods. The patrons in the
restaurant had thinned out, and a server came to take away the tray with the
lacquered boxes that had held their eel. They were both silent. Eventually
Daisuké summoned the courage to reach across and squeeze the back of
Rié’s hand resting on the tabletop. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that
he gently sheltered it. Rié had not seen this coming. Nevertheless, the
warmth of that palm—blistered as it was from chainsaw work—was
comforting, and she found that she was happy. If he hadn’t taken the
initiative, she might have done the same thing herself.
Rié remained still like that for a time. And looking down at a once-
clear plastic cup now clouded from long use, she thought about whether she
ought to give in to this change that had arrived in her life.

After they were married, Daisuké went to live in Rié’s family home, and
they had a girl they named Hana. By the time Daisuké met with his accident
in the mountains, Yuto was twelve and Hana was three. When Rié heard the
news, she rushed to the hospital, but Daisuké was already dead.
Given his risky line of work, they had discussed the eventuality of
something happening to him on several occasions. Daisuké had told her that
under no condition did he ever want her to contact his family in Gunma or
associate with them in any way even if he passed away. Rié respected his
wishes until the first anniversary of his death. Then, after consulting with
her mother and her friends, she decided to notify his family by letter. Her
main purpose was to ask them what to do about his grave. She still had
nowhere to entomb his ashes.
Rié wondered if she should have insisted her husband make amends
with his family and regretted not pushing him more. His death had been far
too abrupt, leaving many things unfinished.

Daisuké’s elder brother, Kyoichi Taniguchi, flew to Miyazaki as soon as he

received the letter.
When Kyoichi stepped out of his rented car in front of their house, Rié
went out to greet him at the front door. She had only ever seen his photo,
and in person, he seemed different than she had imagined him. Wearing
white pants with a navy-blue jacket and a belt embossed with a big brand-
name logo, Kyoichi bore no resemblance to Daisuké. This accorded with
what she had been told. But he didn’t come off as the sort of well-meaning
slob Daisuké had made him out to be. To the contrary, he struck her as
standoffish and arrogant.
“Thank you for coming all this way,” said Rié. Her manner was genial,
meant to let him know that he was family. But Kyoichi gave her a look like
he had touched something monstrous.
“The weather’s warm down here,” he said, staring unwaveringly at
this woman who now went by his family name. Rié’s gaze stopped on the
sunglasses dangling from his chest, where she saw the reflection of herself
and her mother wearing disconcerted smiles.
As her mother led Kyoichi into the sitting room, the scent of cologne
incongruous with the daytime trailed him down the hall, making Rié
conscious of all the rustic smells of their daily life at home. Kyoichi seemed
restless as he sat on the couch, rotating his head to take in the low ceiling,
the cupboard decorated with photos, and the rest of their abode. In her
letter, Rié had already told Kyoichi when Daisuké had arrived in town and
how he had lived since. But he seemed on the verge of marveling aloud that
his brother had died in such a place. When Rié served him coffee, Kyoichi
made no move to touch it.
“Sorry for all the trouble he’s caused you,” he said.
“No . . . ,” said Rié, surprised that he would apologize. “I’m sorry for
not inviting you to the funeral.”
“Let me cover the ceremony, the grave, and any other expenses you
had to shoulder.”
“No, don’t worry about it.”
“I bet he talked shit about me, right?” Kyoichi started to draw a pack
of cigarettes from his pocket and then stopped himself.
Rié studied his face for a few seconds.
“He said almost nothing about his past. Just that . . .”
“He never wanted to see us again? That’s fine. I know. That bastard
was like a big ball of inferiority complex on legs, just full of envy all the
time, and it warped him to the core. We didn’t get along, OK? Our
personalities were off from day one. This kind of thing happens even with
family, right? Why couldn’t he have led a decent life? Getting crushed to
death by a tree in a place like this . . . I’ll respect my parents to the end. I
haven’t even told Mother about this yet.”
 Rié made sure not to let it show on her face, but she rebelled at both
what Kyoichi had said and how he had said it. There was no way this
rudeness was just a cover for sadness. She’d loved Daisuké’s soft-spoken
kindness from the bottom of her heart and decided that if Kyoichi saw
Daisuké the way he seemed to, then there had to be something wrong with
him. At last she understood why her husband had been so insistent about
staying away from his elder brother and suddenly wished that she could
apologize for urging him on several occasions to contact his family.
“You had a kid, right? With Daisuké?”
“Yes. Our child is at day care now.”
“It’s got to be tough, being a parent on your own. I have three little
ones myself—yours is a girl, right?”
“Yes.”
“That would make her my niece . . . I would have liked to see her face,
but I better not overstay my welcome. Before I take off, maybe I’ll just burn
some incense for him.”
“By all means. It’s this way to the altar.”
“Oh yeah. Here are some pastries we make at the inn.” Kyoichi held
out a paper bag with a wrapped box inside. “Please give them a try. They’re
fantastic. I know they’re the traditional kind, but they go well with black tea
or coffee or really anything.”

Rié led Kyoichi to their Buddhist altar room and ushered him inside while
her mother watched the two of them from a short distance. Kyoichi knelt on
the tatami floor in front of the altar. After staring at the memorial photo of
the deceased for a while, he looked over his shoulder and said, “What’s
this?”
“That’s a photo from about a year before he passed away.”
“Uh-huh. Who is it?”
“Which one do you mean? Oh, that’s my father and my son.”
“Your son . . . ? No, not that one—this one. You don’t have a
memorial photo of Daisuké?”
“That’s it. That’s the one.”
 Kyoichi scowled in astonishment. Then he glanced once more at the
photo and looked up suspiciously at Rié.
“That isn’t Daisuké.”
“Huh?”
Kyoichi looked back and forth between Rié and her mother with
angry, disgusted eyes. Then he smiled awkwardly, his cheeks twitching.
“Oh boy. I really don’t get it . . . What? This guy went around using
my brother’s name? Um, it was Daisuké Taniguchi, right?”
“That’s right . . . You mean he looks different from when he was
younger?”
“No. I’m not saying he’s changed or anything like that. This guy is
someone else entirely.”
“This isn’t Daisuké? Wait, you are his elder brother, Kyoichi
Taniguchi, aren’t you?”
“That’s me.”
They were silent for a time.
“Have you submitted the marriage registration, death notification, and
all the other paperwork to the local office?” Kyoichi asked.
“Of course. He kept a photo of you and your family, you know.”
“I don’t mean to be rude, but can you show it to me, like, now?”
When Rié brought him the photo album, Kyoichi took it and sat cross-
legged on a floor cushion.
“Who the hell is this? What the . . . ?” From the first page onward,
Kyoichi kept making such remarks under his breath, craning his neck over
the album.
Despite her confusion, Rié felt insulted when Kyoichi let out a laugh,
as though mocking her and Daisuké’s marriage. She was getting creeped
out, less due to doubts about Daisuké than worries about who this man in
their house was supposed to be. Her mother seemed to have likewise grown
scared and came over to take Rié’s arm.
The album was assembled by Daisuké from printouts of his digital
shots. Kyoichi studied page after page of photos in which the man who had
claimed to be Daisuké appeared alongside Rié, Yuto, and Hana, until he
turned to the final page. There, his eyes went wide at an old photo of
Kyoichi himself together with his parents at their family home. He could
still remember why Daisuké didn’t appear in the photo: he’d been the one
who took it.
When Kyoichi eventually raised his head, he looked up at Rié, the
muscles around his mouth twitching, before immediately averting his gaze.
Then, wearing a dumbfounded expression, he said, “So, unless you’re up to
some weird scheme . . . I hate to say it, but this creep had you fooled.
Because that is not my brother. Somebody was impersonating Daisuké.”
“What are you saying?” Rié asked gravely. “Then who was he?”
“You tell me. Like, I just saw his photo for the first time right now . . .
Anyways, I guess the only thing we can do is go to the police. Don’t you
think it’s got to be a scam or something?”
 CHAPTER THREE

Riding the Tokyu Toyoko Line back to his home in Yokohama, Akira Kido
was standing beside one of the doors, lost in thought.
He had been lucky enough to get a seat when he boarded at Shibuya
Station but had given it up to a pregnant woman he noticed nearby. She
appeared to be about eight months into her term, as far as he could tell
under the coat she was wearing. Although the train was not especially
crowded, none of the passengers had seemed at all concerned about her. To
them, the unborn child might as well not have existed.
The woman got off at Tamagawa Station and gave Kido a polite bow
for the second time as she passed.
“Thank you.” She mouthed the words almost soundlessly with a look
of sympathy.
“Take care,” Kido responded without thinking, his manner of speech
more casual than he would have liked.
The soft smile they traded left him with a pleasant, lingering charge.
Now his thoughts turned to the baby inside her who would never know of
their fleeting interaction. He or she would need countless such anonymous
acts of goodwill to safely enter the world and grow up. And he found it
comforting to know that he had been able to offer one of them.
This reminded him of a conversation he’d had at the firm the other
day. He and the other lawyers had been talking about middle-aged
depression, which was becoming increasingly common around them, as it
was in society more generally. Since there was no predicting when one
might fall into such bottomless self-loathing, Kido had made the tongue-in-
cheek suggestion that they begin to “gather evidence” to prove to
themselves that they were not terrible people as insurance against such an
eventuality.
Each time the train moved past a stretch of buildings, Kido watched as
the windows took on the fading colors of twilight. The last glimmer of light
on the horizon melted away too fast for his eyes to catch. Then his
reflection in the glass grew distinct, and looking away, he began to brood
over the predicament of his client, Rié Taniguchi.

It was nearly eight years ago now, back in 2004, that Kido had agreed to
serve as Rié’s divorce attorney. In the beginning, she went by her husband’s
family name, Yoneda, and once she had returned to her maiden name,
Takemoto, after a yearlong mediation process, his job for her was complete.
They had not been in contact since, and when he’d received an email the
previous month, he did not at first put it together that it was from her,
because her family name had changed once again, this time to Taniguchi.
As soon as he realized it was the same Rié, he rejoiced for her in his heart.
She had remarried.
But upon speaking with her on the phone, he learned that her new
husband, “Daisuké Taniguchi,” had already passed away and had since
turned out to be a different person. That is, someone had masqueraded as
“Daisuké Taniguchi,” lived in matrimony with Rié, and even fathered a
child with her. What’s more, “Daisuké Taniguchi” was apparently not a
made-up name but a person, according to census information listed on his
family register, who actually existed.
Kido was skeptical of the story. Cases of identity concealment through
use of a false name were common enough, and he could understand why
people might want to hide their real name in some circumstances. In fact,
this was all too easy for Kido to relate to because he was third-generation
Zainichi. Many such ethnically Korean residents whose families had settled
in Japan before the end of World War II had taken up Japanese names, and
some chose to hide their heritage. Kido himself had only become a
naturalized Japanese citizen in high school. So what perplexed him wasn’t
that someone would pretend to be a fictional person but that they would
pretend to be a real one.
 To make matters even more baffling, this man had not merely gone
around introducing himself by another person’s name. His identity had been
legally verified by government officials when they updated his family
register upon receipt of his notification of marriage and then again with his
notification of death. He had driven a car with his license and gone to the
doctor with his health insurance card while making all his pension
contributions punctually. Every public record attested to the deceased man
being Daisuké Taniguchi, and there appeared to be no discrepancies in his
own account of his upbringing in Gunma. Yet he did not look like Daisuké
Taniguchi, whose brother had visited Rié a year after her husband’s death
and sworn, upon seeing his photograph, that they were different people.
What on earth could this all be about? Kido was still trying to work
out how he might contribute to the situation as a lawyer. But he had
decided, first of all, to help sort out any inheritance-related issues, and was
now on his way home from a meeting with said actual brother, Kyoichi
Taniguchi.

After completing the trial hearing for a different case at the Tokyo District
Court earlier that day, Kido had gone to speak with Kyoichi in the lounge of
the Cerulean Hotel in Shibuya. Kyoichi, the fourth-generation inheritor of
an inn in Ikaho Onsen, had his permed hair styled in a spiky, wet look.
Either on account of the hairspray or his cologne, a choking smell assaulted
Kido before they had even exchanged greetings. Dressed in an outfit
straight out of a men’s magazine fashion column with a caption like
“Middle-Aged Playboy Essentials,” Kyoichi explained that he frequently
visited Tokyo for business meetings. In fact, later on he would be going to
the Roppongi nightclub district to, as he put it, “catch up with an old
friend,” and Kido was shocked by the lewd overtones in the way he said
this with a suggestive smile. Although the inn’s home page included a
photograph of Kyoichi’s wife, describing her as the “Beautiful
Proprietress,” Kido now wondered if Kyoichi kept a mistress from his
Tokyo days—not that it mattered. Kido was simply amazed that the man
felt compelled to imply such possibilities to a lawyer that he was meeting
for the first time.
 Kyoichi’s story itself, however, setting aside his chatty self-
introduction—or perhaps even when factoring it in after all—was to the
point, businesslike, and unfaltering, giving Kido the impression that he
wasn’t lying. That is to say, it appeared that the man Rié married truly
hadn’t been Daisuké Taniguchi.
At one point, Kyoichi leaned close with theatrical furtiveness and
lowered his voice as though concerned about being overheard.
“You think Daisuké’s alive? You don’t think the guy that switched
places with him might’ve bumped him off? You never know. That wife of
his, she even had a photo of my family in Gunma. One that Daisuké took
back in the day. It’s creepy . . . Yeah, me and her went to the police. But to
be honest, I wouldn’t want this to get out. We’ve got our customers to think
about, you know. That wife of his, if everything she says is true, I guess
she’s a victim, but, like, she did get his life insurance. Shouldn’t they
investigate her too?”
Since Kido had a younger brother of his own and had grown
accustomed to family disagreements as part of his job, he understood how
complicated the relationship between middle-aged brothers could be. Even
so, Kyoichi’s attitude toward his brother came across as oddly callous.
Kido tried asking about the conflict among the Taniguchis surrounding
the liver transplant, but Kyoichi interrupted, obviously upset.
“No. Not true. The guy that impersonated him got it all wrong! I bet
he looked it up online or something, right? Or maybe Daisuké told him
about it in his messed-up way.
“Of course we wanted Dad to live a long life, the whole family did.
Even Daisuké. Obviously, right? But there’s no way my old man would
ever have twisted his arm to become the donor! Not in a million years. That
little shit decided to step forward of his own free choice. Then he goes and
warps it all so he can whine about it after the fact. He was always like that!
Like when he said he wanted to inherit the business, I handed it over to
him! It’s not like I had any interest in some hot spring inn out in the
boonies, to tell the truth. But my parents came crying to me, saying it was
hopeless with him, so I had no choice but to go back. Yup. And instead of
thanks, what do I get from Daisuké? Bitterness and him being all jealous of
me like a brat because the eldest male is more important or some shit. What
an idiot, right?
 “Honestly, I don’t know if I should be saying this kind of thing to a
lawyer, but let me tell you, I’ve had it up to here with that asshole. Do you
have any idea how much trouble he’s caused the family? How worried
Mother has been since he disappeared all of a sudden? Forget what would
happen if he’s been murdered, if Daisuké’s gone hoodlum and got himself
mixed up in some wacked-out crime or something, our inn is finished!”
Despite being worked up, Kyoichi just managed to keep himself from
shouting and only let loose some flailing gestures at the very end.
“Don’t get me wrong, I am worried about the guy. No question about
that. He is family after all . . . But, you know . . .” Kyoichi sighed as though
he lacked the energy to finish what he was saying.
After this, although Kido wasn’t sure how they got on to the topic,
Kyoichi went on a long spiel about how tasty the soft-shelled turtle served
at their inn was. Kido nodded along and made polite noises to show he was
listening, until deciding he should at least contribute something to the
conversation and began to say, “There’s a historic restaurant in Kyoto . . .”
But Kyoichi, as though he had been waiting for just such an opportunity,
immediately stated the name of this well-known restaurant, which had been
frequented by famous literary figures for many years.
“The turtle in those old joints stinks so bad you can’t eat it. They’re
just not keeping up with the times,” said Kyoichi. “I had to go on an epic
tour sampling food all over the place to find our chef. He’s basically a
culinary genius. And I’m not just bragging. I mean it.”
Kido had done his legal apprenticeship in Kyoto and a senior lawyer
who took him under his wing had treated him once at that restaurant. The
subtle flavors had so impressed him that Kido still occasionally reminisced
with this mentor about their visit, and it was all he could do not to cringe at
Kyoichi’s speech. Kido didn’t know much about Daisuké Taniguchi, but
with a blowhard brother like this, who wouldn’t want to leave home?

Kido lived on the ninth floor of a condo just around the corner from the
Chinatown in Yokohama. He had purchased it four years earlier with his
wife, Kaori, each of them taking out a thirty-five-year mortgage. Three
years younger than Kido, Kaori was an office worker at a car company, and
they had a four-year-old son named Sota. The two of them had wanted to
have a second child immediately, and the layout of their home was meant
for two children, but this hadn’t gone as planned and recently they had both
stopped talking about it.
When Kido returned home that night, they sat down for a meal of
deep-fried chicken and savory steamed buns that he had picked up in
Chinatown, during which he had to keep reminding Sota to stay in his chair.
It was a dinner much like always, but for some reason this quotidian scene
stirred up Kido’s emotions like never before.
After they were finished, it was Kido’s turn to give Sota a bath. At day
care, they had been reading a picture book of Greek myths for young
children, and Sota asked Kido, as he haltingly described the plot, why
Narcissus transformed into a flower.
“That’s a tough one, son. With a story like this, I guess they must have
started off with a narcissus flower and then used it to imagine stuff. Like,
hey, I wonder why it’s so beautiful? Hey, I wonder why its neck is all
droopy? Then someone would go, ‘I know, it must have happened like
this.’”
Kido made an honest effort to reply, but Sota seemed to feel that he
was skirting the question. The upshot was that it became Kido’s homework
to look up the answer.
After the bath, the two of them went to Sota’s room and sat together,
browsing an illustrated guide to the Ultraman series. That was when Kido
realized why his son had been fixating on the transformation of Narcissus;
Ultraman went through his own kind of transformation, from a human into
a giant alien.
Presently Kido turned out the light and, while putting his son to bed,
fell asleep beside him. When he woke up in the middle of the night, the
light was out in the master bedroom, and the door was shut. He had
temporarily converted the room intended for their second child into his
study, and ever since putting in a bed for the purpose of taking naps, he and
his wife had been sleeping separately. In the end, both of them rested better
that way. So aside from telling her about the day care Christmas party over
dinner, the day ended without them talking.
Alone in the living room, Kido sat in a chair by the window holding an ice-
cold bottle of Finlandia vodka, in the mood to get a bit tipsy. The space the
bottle occupied in their chronically food-crammed freezer was the frequent
source of his wife’s complaints. As he gripped it, the frost turned to water in
the exact shape of his hand and dripped gradually down the sides.
Kido poured himself a glass. The vodka was so deliciously cold the
consistency was thick, and it had a kick to it like a sweet blaze in his mouth.
The scent went up into his nose, recalling faint flashes of the doctor
swabbing his arm before a shot in childhood, when he had for the first time
discovered the existence of something called “alcohol.”
Kido put on a live V.S.O.P. album at low volume and finished his first
glass listening to an encore medley of “Stella by Starlight” and “On Green
Dolphin Street.” The notes of Wayne Shorter’s tenor sax, reaching what
struck him as perhaps the pinnacle of sensuality, stretched out so long it was
painful and pierced Kido through. He listened to the medley three times
before stopping the CD. That was enough music for him, for he felt both his
inner and outer worlds grow placid while maintaining their separateness.
He loved dearly the angle he took when he was getting drunk on
vodka. As though diving with no oxygen tank, he sunk in a straight line,
heading toward the abyss of inebriation. His path along the way was
transparent, words could never catch up with him, and even the flavor was
like light sparkling on the distant surface of the water when he looked back.
After drinking two glasses in succession, Kido had become completely
removed from the mundane at last, attaining the solitude in its depths. He
flopped back in his easy chair like a rag doll. And for a while, he remained
with his neck tilted in the same posture, pleasantly drunk.
I’m happy . . . , thought Kido, remembering the intense feeling of joy
that had come upon him suddenly when he was holding his son’s hand in
the dark bedroom earlier.
I am the father of that child, he said to himself, and each of these
words—not just “father” and “child” but every syllable that wove them into
relation—transported him into ecstasy. It was an epiphany so huge that
Kido thought he might lose himself in it, while sensing simultaneously that
the incredible specialness that banal moment with his son had assumed was
ultimately the flip side of his anxiety. Overwhelmed, he had a premonition
that he might even look back on this night as the happiest of his life . . .
Although the official story of Kido and Kaori’s first meeting was that they
had been “introduced by an acquaintance,” they would never have dreamed
of going into detail about the frivolous party where it actually occurred.
Amidst conversation that indulged in obscenity at every turn, full of forced
laughter and raps of pretend enthusiasm on the tables, they had just barely
discovered each other’s existence.
Every time Kido recalled the event, he wished ruefully that they’d met
under circumstances more fitting to the serious spouses they had become.
The fact that their relationship had been utterly sexless since the Great East
Japan Earthquake the previous year only contributed a sardonic bitterness to
his recollections. Truth be told, they had never reminisced once about their
initial encounter, and in the process of repeating their story about the
acquaintance’s introduction, had begun to half believe it themselves.
Kaori was the daughter of a well-to-do dentist whose family had lived
for generations in Yokohama. Her brother, who was four years older, had
become a doctor of internal medicine instead of following in their father’s
footsteps and had recently renovated their father’s office to open his own
practice. They were a conservative but generous family and had helped
considerably with the down payment on Kido and Kaori’s condo.
When Kido went to ask Kaori’s father for permission to marry her, he
had smiled and said, “Zainichi or not, after three generations you’re a full-
blown Japanese.” At these words of welcome lacking any hint of animosity,
Kido could only bow and say that he was looking forward to being part of
the family. As for Kaori’s mother, she used to ask him questions about
Korea whenever she could fit them into the conversation, probably in an
effort to show polite interest. This was during the Korean Wave of pop
culture that caught on in the 2000s. But once she realized that he could
barely give passable answers and couldn’t even read the Korean alphabet,
she gave up on all such queries.
Kido only began to give more than a passing thought to the connection
between his ancestry and his in-laws after the Great East Japan Earthquake,
when the media made mention several times of the massacre of Koreans in
the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake nearly ninety years
earlier. As Kido had paid little attention to such issues, this was the first
time he learned that Yokohama had been one of the main places where the
incendiary false rumors about a “Korean riot” had originated. He was
reminded then of his father-in-law’s surprising words and wondered
whether they had implied more than he realized.
Kaori’s grandfather, who was now in a home, would have experienced
the Great Kanto Earthquake as a young child, while her long-dead great-
grandfather would have been an adult in his prime. The earthquake had
reportedly devastated Yokohama, with 80 percent of urban areas lost to fire,
and Kido wondered what the two of them might have been doing in the
maelstrom of brutal violence in its aftermath . . .
Obviously he had not asked his wife’s parents about these matters. He
hadn’t even asked Kaori. Since the Great East Japan Earthquake, they had
discussed the major earthquake expected to strike the Tokyo region directly,
but never even touched upon the Great Kanto Earthquake in comparison.

What is the past to love? Kido wondered as he thought about Rié’s late
husband. I suppose it’s a fact that the present is a result of the past. In other
words, one is able to love someone in the present thanks to the past that
made them the way they are. While genetics are surely a factor too, if that
person had lived under different circumstances, they would have probably
become a different person—but people are incapable of telling others their
entire past, and regardless of their intentions, the past explained in words is
not the past itself. If the past someone told diverged from the true past,
would the love for that person be mistaken somehow? If it was an
intentional lie, would that make it all meaningless? Or could it give rise to
new love?
Unlike Kido, who was from Kanazawa, all the way up on the Sea of
Japan, Kaori had remained in the area where she was born and raised,
graduating from nearby Keio University, and had thus been able to stay in
touch with her friends from both middle school and high school. She had
told him about a number of her memories from as far back as childhood,
and Kido knew the incidents well. He had never suspected, of course, that
they might be lies.
 But supposing his wife had related the life story of a complete stranger
as though it were her own, Kido would have undoubtedly believed her just
the same. And his understanding of her would have been shaped in
accordance with the type of person the story portrayed her to be. It was
Kaori who might have been more justified in doubting Kido’s past since he
had grown up far away, though his early “confession” of the fact that he
was third-generation Zainichi would have given her a rationale for thinking
that he was sincere.
The only chance Kido might have had to clue in to any contradictions
would have been when meeting those who knew Kaori’s past. If she had
been living in an unfamiliar place, having cut off all contact with her family
and friends, there would have been no way to verify her past short of hiring
a detective. Daisuké Taniguchi had apparently avoided all social media
because he had been in just such a situation.
No, not Daisuké Taniguchi, Kido told himself, trying to sort out the
confusion taking hold in his mind. Rié’s husband had been a different man
who had merely impersonated Daisuké Taniguchi. In keeping with the
practices of his profession, he decided for the time being to call him X.
Ever since Kido had heard the story of X from Rié, the man’s
existence had haunted him. Whether walking, riding the train, or having a
meal with his family, Kido found himself thinking about X, like when a
melody won’t stop playing in your head.
What was such a phenomenon called? In the case of music, it was an
earworm, but here . . . ?
To start your life over as a completely different person—Kido had
never found the notion compelling before. Of course, in his teenage years,
he had frequently idolized and wanted to be like all sorts of people. Once he
had even burned with envy to become a boy that the girl he had a crush on
liked. But none of these wishes had been anything more than passing
fantasies.
All day today, he had felt blessed by the life he was leading, as he had
told himself repeatedly. Through his job, he came into contact with the
misfortunes of the world more often than most. This was especially true of
criminal cases, where the ins and outs were often so tragic that they almost
seemed cordoned off in a universe apart from the everyday, making him
reflect on the significance of his life being different.
 I am happy right now, he reiterated in his mind, but this was merely an
irritated call for the strange emotions stirring in his chest to relent.
To throw away everything and become someone else—imagining
doing this undeniably aroused in Kido a certain beguiling excitation. It was
not necessarily only in the midst of despair that someone might be placed at
the mercy of such a yearning but also when happiness was interrupted by
ennui. And though he remained wary of this danger, Kido delved into his
heart no further.
If the impersonation was a fact, then X had committed several crimes,
including making a false entry on a notarized public document—whether
the police would actually go to the trouble of pressing charges was another
question. If, on the other hand, it turned out that he had committed
homicide or a comparably serious act as Kyoichi had tried to claim, then
Kido would have to seek advice from a colleague at the firm who was better
versed in criminal cases.

This will be my last glass, Kido thought as he poured a third. The water that
dripped off the bottle had left a circular stain on the table. It looked to him
like a misshapen simulacrum of the crescent moon in the distant night sky.
Kido considered the predicament of Rié, who had lost three family
members—her small child, her not-so-elderly father, and her young
husband—one after the next. In his mind’s eye, he saw her girlish face and
her big eyes, as she nodded only to the parts of Kido’s explanation that she
truly understood and accepted. Although her figure was petite overall, she
had somewhat thickset shoulders that seemed to support her unflinching
spirit. He deeply pitied the poor woman. What despair she must have felt to
lose a two-and-a-half-year-old child to illness. It was beyond imagining for
Kido, but Rié was strong-minded and somehow managed to smile whenever
her surviving child was present. If Kido wasn’t mistaken, the boy would be
entering middle school soon.
Rié’s wishes regarding her divorce had been firm, and she had
unswervingly rejected the possibility of mending her relationship with her
husband. The cause of their falling-out had been a clash over their child’s
sickness and its treatment. The boy, Ryo, grew ill just as he was
approaching his second birthday, and was initially diagnosed with a kind of
brain tumor called a germinoma. This terrible news had been a shock to
both Rié and her husband, but they had been encouraged by the prognosis: a
survival rate of 98 percent over five years with radiation treatment and
chemotherapy.
The surgical biopsy usually performed at this stage was cancelled due
to Rié’s husband’s fierce opposition. The doctor had explained that the
procedure presented some risk to such a young patient and that if it turned
out Ryo didn’t have a germinoma, the most likely diagnosis would be a
malignant tumor in an inoperable location. Rié thought that they should go
through with the biopsy, but her husband insisted that it was irrational to
expose their son to danger for the sole purpose of knowing whether or not it
was a disease that could not in any case be cured. And unable to hold her
ground in a debate surrounding a topic as slippery as risk, she allowed him
to persuade her to go along with him.
For the following three months, Ryo was afflicted with vomiting as he
underwent the grueling germinoma treatment. Rié quit the bank she had
been working at since university graduation to remain by his bedside. But
the tumor did not shrink as expected. Instead, it grew. Based on the results
of another MRI, the doctor gave a new name to Ryo’s tumor—glioblastoma
—and pronounced that the boy had less than a year to live.
“What I’d like you to do now,” he said, “is stay close to home and try
to enjoy the time that remains with your son.”
Rié took Ryo to another hospital, but the diagnosis was the same and
he died only four months later. He had lived a mere seven months after
visiting the first hospital and spent three of those tormented by the pointless
treatment.
While both parents were overcome with remorse, Rié’s husband tried
to rally her and Yuto to move past this calamity together as a family. But
Rié was firm in her refusal and said that she wanted a divorce. Not because
she blamed him for their son’s death. On the contrary, she agonized over the
belief that it was her fault. Rather, she simply could not accept the idea of
sharing her future with a person like her husband.
As much as Kido sympathized with her, he had to explain that, legally
speaking, this on its own would not stand as a conclusive reason for
divorce. At the same time, he felt sorry for the husband. Although it was
true that he had committed an irreversible error of judgment as a father,
when Kido asked his brother-in-law for his opinion as a doctor, he said that
it was a difficult decision for a layman to make, that the doctor’s
explanation had been flawed, and that, in any case, he couldn’t understand
why the wife was so angry with her husband. What swayed Kido to
nonetheless take on the case was something he sensed in Rié, a sort of
complex but pure facet of her humanity that seemed to be seeking a deeper
dimension of compassion in him.
When Kido met with her husband as Rié’s attorney, he soon
understood why her feelings toward him had hardened. Launching into a
lengthy rant, the man emphasized his own suffering, railed against Rié’s
stupidity and madness for pinning the responsibility on him, appealed to
Kido as a lawyer and therefore fellow rational human being, described in
tears the pain of losing a child, insisted on his great love for Rié, and finally
pressed Kido to persuade her to get back together with him. In keeping with
Rié’s appraisal of her husband, he did not appear to be a bad person. But it
was heartrending for Kido to see how the man’s bloated sense of self-
importance had hurt his wife, had put their young child through agony
during what little time had remained to him, and was now in the process of
bringing his own life to ruin.
Over the yearlong divorce mediation, Kido let her husband get all his
complaints off his chest while doing his best to make him realize that there
was no hope of his regaining Rié’s love. Oddly, the man came to treat Kido
with something like reverence, repeatedly rehashing Kido’s legal
explanations in his own words and discovering a new salve for his wounded
pride in feeling as though he properly understood them. Much as with many
perpetrators of domestic violence, his efforts to show Kido that he was a
respectable person reeked of desperation.
After ten months had elapsed, Rié’s husband began to show signs of
impatience with the mediation. Kido couldn’t help noticing that he was in
an uncharacteristically good mood about something and, though he had
some compunctions about it, decided to hire a detective to investigate.
Then, showing the husband a photograph of him with the new woman he
was seeing, Kido advised that the time was ripe to conclude their
negotiations. In the end, with a surprising lack of rancor, Rié’s husband
consented not only to divorce but also to handing over custody of Yuto, an
issue he had until then refused to budge on.
Now, Rié had met with the misfortune of losing her second husband—
who, moreover, had been deceiving her the whole time about his identity.
To what end, I wonder? Sitting up with a sigh, Kido glanced at the
clock. It was nearly two in the morning. He tried to consider this question
further, but was interrupted when a heavy yawn escaped him.
Kyoichi Taniguchi had introduced him to several people who he said
might know his brother’s whereabouts, but claimed that the most promising
lead was Daisuké’s former lover. Setting aside the question of who X truly
was, Kido was confident he could find records of Daisuké Taniguchi
changing his address on the attachment to his family register and decided
that tracking down that document would be the best way to start looking for
him.
He gulped down the final drab of vodka in his glass. Now lukewarm,
it lingered sharp and bitter on his tongue, eliciting a slight sigh, the last one
of the day.
 CHAPTER FOUR

When Kido’s work finally settled down in the new year, toward the end of
January 2013, he arranged a meeting with Misuzu Goto, the woman said to
be Daisuké Taniguchi’s former lover.
Although the phone number Kyoichi Taniguchi gave him was out of
service, he had also mentioned that she was a web designer, and Kido had
used this information to track down her Facebook page. After he sent her a
message explaining the situation, her reply came swiftly. She appeared to be
confused and worried about Daisuké and asked Kido to come to a friend’s
bar in Tokyo where she worked nights on the side. Kido doubted it would
be an appropriate place to talk but nonetheless agreed, supposing that she
was wary of meeting him alone.

The bar was located in an area of Shinjuku called Arakicho, a short walk
from Yotsuya-Sanchome Station. It was an old district of intricately
connecting alleys lined with bars and restaurants. Since it was his first time
visiting, Kido decided to take a brief stroll. Thankfully the cold and the
light snowfall of the morning had cleared up in the afternoon when the
clouds broke.
Kido quickly discovered that there was no shortage of places to drink
in Arakicho, not to mention a variety of eateries that specialized in
everything from German and Spanish cuisine to curry, pork cutlet, sushi,
and other traditional fare. He’d already had a light meal of buckwheat
noodles in the underground restaurant area of the Tokyo Bar Association
Building to tide him over for his meeting with Misuzu but, seeing the
mouthwatering options he might have enjoyed here, was now beginning to
regret it.
In preparation for his visit, Kido had asked one of his partners at the
firm, who was an avid reader, about Arakicho. Displaying meticulous
knowledge of the area, this colleague had explained that it used to be a
famous pleasure district. It had been featured in the 1931 novella During
the Rains by Kafu Nagai, and there was a nearby publishing company
housed in the building of what had been a love hotel during the heady days
of the bubble economy. Even on this Monday evening, there was a fair
number of people out and about, with taxis frequently coming and going.
On the second floor of a building full of small establishments, Kido
spotted the sign for the one he was scheduled to visit. It read “Sunny” in
stylized yellow lettering reminiscent of sunshine, and Kido thought it was a
nifty name for a bar that only operated at night. Upon asking later, he would
learn that it had been taken from a hit song by Bobby Hebb.
The interior was pleasantly dim and cozy, with just enough space for a
bar accommodating six stools and two low tables with sofa seating. When
Kido stepped in just after eight o’clock, an old live album of Ray Charles
played on the sound system. It appeared to be a soul bar, the walls densely
festooned with related paraphernalia, including a Marvin Gaye LP and a
photo of a child Stevie Wonder. The sofas were taken. At the counter, a lone
man with the air of a regular was drinking Guinness while practicing magic
tricks with a coin.
“Welcome,” called a woman behind the counter. She squinted at Kido
as though trying to decide if he was indeed the man she was expecting.
From beneath a studded black cap, her lightened hair draped behind her ears
and hung down over slender shoulders, her features sharp and defined, with
gray-colored contacts that made her pupils glisten along with her lips. Kido
thought she was beautiful.
Dressed in shredded jeans and a loose black sweater that made her
look more rock than soul, she sat on a stool, cradling one knee in its ripped
denim as she talked with an unshaven man of about fifty in a black hoodie
who turned out to be the proprietor. Unlike her, his style matched the bar’s
theme.
“My name is Akira Kido. I’m the lawyer who contacted you.”
 When Kido presented his business card, the man in the hoodie, whose
name was Takagi, peered at it skeptically.
“Don’t lawyers wear a badge or whatever?” he asked.
“Oh. These days we’re no longer required to wear them. But I happen
to be carrying mine,” Kido replied, taking his badge from his bag. While
Takagi still looked doubtful, Misuzu’s eyebrows shot up.
“Wow. I’ve never seen one of those before. Can I touch it?”
“Of course. Go right ahead.”
As Misuzu would later explain, she had originally been a regular
patron of the bar, but a year earlier had taken up serving two nights a week
for the fun of it. Kido thought she might be seeing Takagi, though her
manner made it difficult to tell. Whatever their relationship, Takagi turned
out to be the one who had advised her to meet there, and although he did
not subject Kido to any more rude probing, it was clear he was keeping an
eye on him.
“Come take a seat. You can hang your coat there,” said Misuzu with a
smile. “What would you like to drink?”
She spoke at a distinctive, relaxed pace, with a sort of cheerful
languor. The swell of her lower eyelids contributed a certain warmth to her
features that softened the distancing force of her beauty.
“Oh, right . . . ,” Kido replied. It was hardly the place for a water, and
he wanted something that wouldn’t be too much trouble for her to make.
“OK. A Chimay Triple.”
After a sip of his Chimay, Kido dived immediately into the matter at
hand. “So, about the issue I explained in my email.”
“Daisuké still hasn’t turned up?”
“I’m afraid not—do you know the man in this photo?” Kido asked,
showing her a photo of X.
Misuzu held it in her hand and looked at it for a while before shaking
her head and returning it to the counter.
“That’s not Daisuké?”
“No. Is that the man who was impersonating Daisuké?”
“That is correct.”
“They look nothing alike. And judging from his build, that man
couldn’t have been very tall. Daisuké was a bit taller than me so . . . about
this high?” She held her hand about the height of Kido’s glass above her
head.
“You mean to say that you don’t recognize him at all, then?”
Misuzu shook her head and passed Kido a brown envelope. “I thought
I might as well bring some pictures of Daisuké, though these are from back
when we were seeing each other, so they’re more than ten years old.”
The envelope contained three photographs, all more recent than any
Kyoichi Taniguchi had been able to provide. Apparently, he was short on
photos from when they were growing up, as it was before the ubiquity of
digital cameras, and lacked any from when they were adults due to their
falling-out. The one Kyoichi had shown him was a family photo with a tiny
image of Daisuké in profile. In the pictures Kido saw now, Daisuké’s
expression, as he faced Misuzu behind the lens, might have been that of a
different person. It was stiff and bashful in the way of someone shy being
photographed by their lover, and Kido could almost see the bemused look
Misuzu must have been wearing in those moments. As expected, Daisuké
Taniguchi did not resemble X.
“Feel free to keep them if you think they’ll be useful . . . I haven’t
been in touch with Daisuké for over a decade now, so I have no idea what’s
going on in his life these days.”
“Really? You see, his elder brother said that you might know how to
reach him.”
Misuzu put some ice in a glass, poured Cinzano Rosso over it, took a
sip, and frowned. “I’ve known Daisuké since high school. We’d date and
then break up and . . . We were together for a while. I guess that’s why
Kyoichi thinks that.”
“Then you’re well acquainted with Kyoichi too?”
“Uh-huh,” said Misuzu with a nod, looking off distractedly at
something behind the counter. Kido thought this might be a sign of her
impatience because he had asked something obvious. When she met his
gaze again, her eyes seemed to urge him to get to the point.
“Were the two brothers on bad terms?”
“I think that Daisuké . . . liked Kyoichi. They were like opposites, but
they got along well until high school at least.” Misuzu started to say
something else, then thought better of it and closed her lips. Kido noticed
but said nothing, allowing her to go on to what was probably a different
topic.
“I don’t think it was so much a problem with the brothers as with their
parents . . . It’s the same old story. They went back and forth about who to
leave their estate to. Kyoichi refused to take over the family business, so
they made Daisuké their backup plan. They should have just given it to him,
but they kept up this attitude about Kyoichi, without coming right out and
saying it, like he could change his mind whenever he wanted. But that just
puts Daisuké’s life on hold, doesn’t it?”
“Did Daisuké-san want to be next in line?”
“Yes. He liked the inn. In Ikaho Onsen, it’s a pretty well-known place,
with some history.”
“So I hear. I took a look at the home page. The new building was done
in contemporary style, but the main building is a really classy piece of
architecture.”
“The new building was Kyoichi’s pet project.” Misuzu gave Kido a
sardonic smile. “All the rooms have outdoor baths that are in plain view
from the bed. The layout ensures complete privacy and the interiors are
chic, but there’s something about them that’s just obscene.”
Kido burst out laughing and tipped back his glass with newfound
cheer. After glugging down some of the beer, he let more laughter slip. This
set off Misuzu, and soon her shoulders shook with laughter as well.
“Well, I suppose those rooms are not exactly suitable for a family
vacation.”
“It’s a high-class love hotel, is what it is. A few years back, a reporter
caught this woman announcer having an affair there.”
“Oh right . . . at Ikaho Onsen . . . I remember that story . . . Now that
you mention it, I saw something about it when I was searching online. I
didn’t take a proper look, though.”
“Kyoichi has done his fair share of playing the field, so he’s got the
whole system fine-tuned. He knows exactly what couples are looking for
when they go on trips to hot springs inns like theirs. Daisuké just doesn’t
understand things like that. He’s a serious guy.”
A wistful and somewhat piteous smile flitted across Misuzu’s face.
“The new building is supposedly a big success,” she continued. “I hear
they were praised for taking in survivors after the earthquake.”
 When she was finished, Kido decided that beer wasn’t cutting it
anymore and ordered a vodka gimlet.
“Sure thing,” Misuzu replied, and began to wield the cocktail shaker
without any hint of showiness, as though she were cooking alone at home.
Her attitude was laid-back and unaffected, despite the fact that they had just
met, and this struck Kido as distinctive of her personality. When she was
done, the vodka gimlet was so thoroughly shaken it fizzed as she poured it
into the frosty glass. Kido found it well chilled and smooth and detected a
mellow sparkle to the flavor.
“Mmm. This is good,” he said.
He wasn’t just being polite. It really was good, and Misuzu beamed a
delighted white-toothed smile that made him believe what she had said
about working the bar for the fun of it. Then she pinched the collar of her
sweater, which had slipped down to inelegantly reveal the divot of her
collarbone, and pulled it back into place. Her small diamond necklace
caught the light and glittered like a grace note in a song.
Another man with “regular” written all over him arrived, sat down on
a stool one removed from Kido, and launched into an animated
conversation with Takagi. The music had changed to a live album of Curtis
Mayfield, the voices of the audience filling the room. Kido decided he had
better ask her a few more questions before the place filled up.
“I suppose it must have been after Daisuké-san’s father passed away
that you lost touch with him.”
“I guess you could say that. We were at the funeral together. He
continued living with his family for a while after that. I’d already moved to
Tokyo then, so we were meeting maybe twice a week.”
“At that time . . . were you, um . . .”
“Yes, we were seeing each other. But then he disappeared suddenly.
No breakup talk, nothing.”
“I see . . . Any emails or calls after that?”
Misuzu shook her head. “His number was disconnected.”
“Would you say Daisuké-san felt hurt about the whole business with
the liver transplant?”
“Who told you about that? Kyoichi?”
“No. The man in the photograph who died with Daisuké-san’s name.
For want of anything better, I’m calling him X. Apparently he told the
woman he was married to, and I heard it from her.”
“How could this guy even know about that? It’s creepy.”
“I don’t know. My best guess is that X met with Daisuké-san. He must
have heard the story from him directly. Then for whatever reason, he must
have felt compelled to imitate him and to live as him, making his past his
own.”
“Why? It’s not like Daisuké had credentials worth being jealous of.
Was the guy after his inheritance or something?”
Across the crescent of Misuzu’s brow under the brim of her cap
flickered a faint shadow of worry.
“I don’t know what X was after. The family estate is a possibility of
course. Sorting out confusion around the inheritance is one of my primary
goals.”
“Is Daisuké OK? Has anyone contacted the police?”
“For now, they’ve accepted a missing person’s report, but that’s all.”
“Shouldn’t we be making a big stink about this, like, telling a TV
station or something?”
“It might get to that eventually, but that’s not what Kyoichi or X’s wife
wants.”
“Why not?”
“She’s still . . . bewildered. As of course she must be. And Kyoichi is
concerned about the inn’s clientele. He says he doesn’t want media attention
about a murder or whatever this turns out to be.”
Misuzu looked appalled and let out a deep sigh.
“Could he have been kidnapped by North Korea or something?”
interjected Takagi, who Kido hadn’t realized was listening.
Kido responded with an ambiguous gesture, somewhere between a
nod of agreement and a quizzical crooking of his neck, as he pressed his
tongue to the roof of his mouth to kill the tang of the gimlet’s lime. The idea
that there might be even the faintest possibility of such a kidnapping struck
him as patently ludicrous. Maybe in the late seventies or early eighties but
certainly not now. And he looked away almost before he realized what he
was doing, afraid that Misuzu, who he’d been growing to like more and
more since the moment they met, might be led by the flow of the
conversation to let slip some slur about Zainichi.
Although Kido was third-generation Zainichi, neither of his parents had
drilled him on the importance of his heritage, and as he had been born and
raised in a typical area of Kanazawa rather than a Korean enclave in one of
the bigger cities, he managed to reach adulthood without, for the most part,
experiencing racism. This was true both when he went by the family name
Lee and after he began to introduce himself as Kido around the start of
middle school. But since his parents never told him their reason for
switching to this Japanese name, he suspected that there may have been
some sort of incident that he was unaware of.
The family business was a regular izakaya with no specialization in
Korean cuisine. Since the teachers at his elementary school would
frequently visit to drink themselves under the table, Kido became well
known among them, even the ones in charge of classes in other years.
In high school, he’d become a Japanese citizen together with his
parents, throwing away his claim to Korean citizenship, which dated to
before the end of World War II. His parents had viewed this choice as
inevitable for him, given that he was completely illiterate in Korean and
could never see his father’s relatives who visited from South Korea as
anything other than foreigners, while Kido was indifferent about his
citizenship.
The catalyst for his change of heart was a piece of advice he received
from his father when he was set to go on a school trip to Australia. The gist
of it was that Kido ought to naturalize so as to avoid any issues involving
his passport, and Kido would never forget his words. In the event that
something happened while he was travelling, his father had warned, he
could only hope for protection from the government of Japan, since the
nation of South Korea did not have any “sense” for him and its government
wasn’t even aware that he existed.
Although his father only ever said “sense” once and didn’t elaborate,
Kido thought that he had chosen the wrong word and guessed that he had
wanted to say “reality.” It was true that South Korea didn’t have any reality
for Kido, at least not in any immediate way. But even now, more than two
decades later, this seemingly out-of-place usage remained stuck in Kido’s
mind, giving rise to a strange image of the personified nation of South
Korea lacking any “sense” of his existence, while, conversely, allowing him
to “sense” the nation of South Korea for the first time. So he sometimes
wondered if it had been intentional after all, rather than a slip of the tongue.
Kido’s father took him aside for talks that touched on his ethnicity on
only two other occasions. The first was when Kido was wavering about
what to do after high school, and he advised him that, due to discriminatory
hiring practices, he should get some sort of national license. Kido had been
taken aback—as if there were such problems in this day and age, let alone
for a naturalized citizen like himself!—and had wanted to dismiss the
suggestion as a bad joke, but his father’s expression had been dead serious.
In the end, although Kido would only drift to law school in the grips of the
fuzzy thinking that plagues many students of the humanities, his father’s
words would contribute to his firm decision, while enrolled there, to try to
see things through and become a lawyer.
The last time his father showed concern about Kido’s ethnicity was
when he got married. While not opposing the marriage, he had joined
Kido’s mother in proposing that he have the ceremony overseas, since
Kido’s maternal grandmother wanted desperately to attend wearing a
jeogori. Kido couldn’t see the point and refused, insisting it would be too
much trouble. Nevertheless, after learning that his wife’s parents were
worried on his behalf about the same issue, he thought it over and decided
to hold the wedding in Hawaii with only relatives in attendance,
incorporating their honeymoon into the same trip. He and Kaori then held a
modest party at a restaurant to celebrate with everyone else upon their
return to Japan. Over the course of all this, Kido’s parents met his in-laws
twice—once at Kaori’s family home for the obligatory prewedding
introduction and once at the wedding—and he observed their almost
groveling degree of nervousness on both occasions with a feeling
somewhere between shame and pity.

Until very recently, this was the extent of Kido’s awareness of his roots, and
while he might have been simply oblivious, he truly could not recall any
discrimination to speak of. He even felt somewhat embarrassed when, upon
moving to Tokyo for university, he heard the stories of other third-
generation Zainichi who had experienced more profound bigotry and
discovered that he did not share their pain. Regarding the political situation
—including the surge in historical revisionism and the domestic backlash
after the Murayama Statement on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of
World War II, in which the prime minister apologized for Japanese
atrocities in Asia—Kido could only be described as obtuse.
It wasn’t until after the Great East Japan Earthquake, when he started
thinking about the massacre of Koreans all too close to home in Yokohama,
that Kido first became uncomfortable with what it meant to be perceived as
someone of the so-called “Korean race.” Aggravating this discomfort were
reports the previous summer of Japan’s rising nationalism and xenophobic
far-right demonstrations provoked by the landing of President Lee Myung-
bak on the disputed island of Takeshima. Such developments forced Kido to
acknowledge that there were some people in the country he lived in that he
did not wish to meet and some places that he did not wish to visit. This was
not an experience that every individual—every citizen—necessarily had to
come to terms with.
Sometime later, an old university pal got in touch with Kido for the
first time in years with the express purpose of informing him—perhaps out
of the misguided belief he was doing him a favor—that Kido’s picture from
one of his elementary school yearbooks had been posted online with the
caption “Zainichi Minted as Lawyer!” Visiting the webpage, Kido
discovered that someone had dug up an assault-and-robbery case he’d
overseen so long ago, even before he was married, that he could barely
remember it. Because the suspect Kido had defended happened to have
been Zainichi, the author had taken it upon themselves to fulminate over a
muddle of fact and spurious distortion. At this barrage of grotesque racial
slurs so outmoded that even Kido, one of their intended targets, had never
heard them, he felt not so much hurt as dumbfounded. What ultimately got
to him was seeing his name and an image of himself as a boy alongside
insults such as “spy” and “North Korean agent.” And the post wasn’t only
about him; it also mentioned that he was married and had one child. This
made him so incensed that his hand shook on the mouse, while the uncanny
perception came over him that the energy in the core of his body was
draining away, as though his capacity to persist across time were breaking
down. Into the gap left behind surged a cold, gunky dissonance that Kido
didn’t think he could ever completely clean out. Never before had he
experienced his mood as a liquid like this.
To this day, Kido still hadn’t told his wife about this episode. Part of
him thought he should, but he didn’t want to and he couldn’t. It wasn’t
simply that Kaori had been concerned about growing reports of hate speech,
as had her mother, who had at one point watched Korean Wave soap operas
with such carefree absorption. The truth was, Kido had grown tired of his
own hypersensitivity to prejudice. In the past, he had always shrugged off
the occasional intolerant sentiments expressed by those around him as some
kind of mistake. Now he almost wished he could still be so blithe.
On the topic of North Korea, Kido lined up with common opinion in
being critical of the authoritarian regime and appalled by the abduction of
Japanese citizens, feeling sincere pity for both the victims and their
families. He grasped well enough—albeit from a somewhat distant
perspective—the impact this issue had on the Zainichi community and the
deep wounds that still lingered. He was also angry at the Japanese
government’s inaction.
Yet when he considered this problem in the light of his ethnicity, it
became something altogether different. Often he would imagine a
hypothetical blood relative of the same generation as him but living under
that regime and find himself drawn inevitably into a kind of fatalistic
speculation. If asked whether he wished for the unification of North and
South on the Korean Peninsula, he probably would have nodded soberly
without being able to articulate why. Likewise regarding whether Japan
should one day pay war reparations and normalize diplomatic relations with
the North. He had no clue, of course, when any of this might happen.

Kido had been hoping to let Takagi’s remark pass without comment, but the
silence stretched out and grew altogether too heavy, so he decided to speak
up.
“An abduction of that sort happened in the eighties. I looked into it a
bit in light of Daisuké’s disappearance. The case involved a bachelor who
worked as a cook at a Chinese restaurant in Osaka. After being invited to a
supposed job interview, he was kidnapped from Miyazaki to North Korea.
A spy who had perfectly adopted the man’s past and career then came to
Japan in order to masquerade as him. It seems that he was active for several
years, acquiring a driver’s license, a health insurance card, and so on,
though he was eventually apprehended upon visiting South Korea.”
In the course of researching the case, Kido had learned the word
“piggybacker,” a piece of Japanese police jargon for a foreign spy who
steals the family register of a local and poses as them.
“What did I tell you? That X guy died in Miyazaki too!” said Takagi,
his eyes wide with amazement at the belief that his idea had unexpectedly
hit the mark. With the two barflies now seeming to perk up their ears also,
Kido noted reluctantly that the time for discussing anything concerning his
client had passed.
“Yes. But that was in another era,” he said. “I’m sure it’s just a
coincidence.”
“But, like, that area is still full of North Korean agents or whatever,
you know.”
“Do you think? Well, I suppose there are intelligence people gathering
information in every country, but I wouldn’t say that area is full of them.”
“But, like, anti-Japanese education in South Korea is messed up, you
know.”
By this point Kido was annoyed, and his jaw stiffened even as he put
on a sour smile. “We are talking about North Korea, correct? Not South?”
“No . . . I mean both.”
“They’re completely different. In South Korea, students learn about
Japan’s former imperialism in history class, sure, but it’s not ‘anti-Japanese’
propaganda or anything of the sort. After all, they don’t allot very much
time for modern history, any more than we do in Japan.”
“Then why do they hate our country?”
“Are you referring to someone you know personally?”
“No. All you’ve got to do is flick on a TV or whatever.”
“Well . . . I’d recommend you take a trip to Seoul and get to know
some of the young people in the nightclubs before you let the TV tell you
what ‘they’ think.”
Not wanting to steer the conversation down any darker turns, Kido
concluded with a genial smile and ordered another gimlet from Misuzu.
Takagi, seeming to pick up on how upset the lawyer actually was from his
crisp manner, said nothing more.
Misuzu looked as though her mind was elsewhere, perhaps on Daisuké
Taniguchi, and Kido took solace in her indifference to the exchange that
had just unfolded. While waiting for his cocktail, he picked up the case for
the CD that was playing, Billy Preston’s The Kids & Me, and looked it over.
Despite the album’s upbeat grooves, the silence between Misuzu and him
lingered, forlorn.
“It would be a serious problem if it turned out that Daisuké Taniguchi
had indeed been abducted by North Korea,” Kido began matter-of-factly,
lowering his voice so as not to include Takagi, “but I really can’t imagine it.
Those abductions happened decades ago. Plus, X was working for a logging
company in a small town. What would a secret agent possibly achieve by
doing dangerous labor out in the sticks?”
As Kido leaned forward speaking confidentially to Misuzu, he
suddenly became aware of a psychological passageway connecting him and
X. It had been opened by their commonality, namely, the respective
circumstances that led others to question their Japanese identity.
“Here you are, gimlet number two.” Misuzu gave Kido a faint smile as
she handed him the glass and, without acknowledging his question, said,
“Poor Daisuké. He really did have it rough. Do you know about the risks of
being a live liver donor?”
“No, not in detail.”
“Well, from what I heard back then, about one in fifty-five hundred in
Japan dies.”
“You mean the donors?”
“Yes. Almost all of them survive, but as many as one or two in ten
have problems with fatigue, or they feel chronic pain in the wound. They
say there are all kinds of complications that can stay with you. Depression,
you name it.”
“Did Daisuké-san’s father ask him directly to be his donor?”
“I can tell you that Daisuké would never have said that, not in a
million years. But wouldn’t you deny being asked if the doctor and your
father wanted you to keep quiet about it?”
“But Kyoichi-san claims that Daisuké-san offered entirely on his own
initiative.”
 “I bet that’s what Daisuké said. Because he was starving for his
family’s love.” On this hackneyed phrase, Misuzu’s voice filled with pity.
“Not only that. I think he felt obligated. I mean, Daisuké was the only one
who could save his father . . . It’s not like risk is black-and-white. He really
beat himself up for not believing that he wouldn’t be that one in fifty-five
hundred. Like, why did he have to be so afraid when other donors did it for
family without question? When the doctor explained that most people get
up from the operating table to lead healthy lives without any kind of
disability, how come he only thought about the handful who suffered?”
“I can relate to that, I think.”
“Right? But Daisuké was really hard on himself, and in the end he
decided to go through with it. I felt so bad for him, watching from the
sidelines . . . But there wasn’t anything I could do.”
Kido kept bobbing his head to indicate both his solidarity with Misuzu
and sympathy for Daisuké Taniguchi. The sweet notes of the classic ballad,
“You Are So Beautiful,” hummed from the speakers. The piano and strings
rose to an overwhelmingly dramatic crescendo that led into the chorus.
Glancing over, Kido noticed that Misuzu was tearing up. He thought it was
about Daisuké Taniguchi until she spoke.
“This song is always too much for me,” Misuzu explained, shaking
her head as she wiped her eyes, smiling. “I’m turning into such a crybaby as
I get older.”
Kido, spellbound by the tender expression on Misuzu’s face, echoed
her sad smile.
“I only know Joe Cocker’s schmaltzy version,” he said. “Is this the
original?”
“Uh-huh. Personally, I like this guy better.”
“It’s my first time hearing Preston, but I think I might agree with you.
Not bad at all.”
“Right?”
“When I was younger, lyrics that praised a lover directly used to make
me squeamish. I must be getting old too.”
“Ahhh.” Misuzu let out a breath, wiping her eyes once more as she
looked upward, and appeared to have herself under control.
“Kyoichi always called Daisuké a little shit,” she said after a brief
pause. “He never appreciated anything he did. He could never understand
why I would date him, or maybe I should say he could never accept it . . .
He had complicated feelings about his loser brother being in a position to
save their father’s life, and when Daisuké couldn’t make up his mind, he
got irritated with him.”
“I see.”
“He told him that the risk was no big deal and he should stop being
such a drama queen, like he was doing their father a big favor. Said that if
his own liver was up to scratch, he would have shut his trap and bitten the
bullet.”
“He said this to Daisuké-san’s face?”
“To their mom. Daisuké overheard it.”
“Ah . . .”
“Who wouldn’t want to run away after that? And then to find yourself
with no one to depend on and get murdered or abducted or . . .” Trailing off,
Misuzu shook her head and seemed to lose herself in thought again. The
hair hanging over her shoulders swayed, and she brushed it back behind her
ears before bringing her glass to her lips.
“I think he’s still alive,” said Kido. “I’ll do what I can to track him
down.”
He was willing to bet that Daisuké Taniguchi was a good man.
Anyone who could appreciate such a fine woman and who she could love
deeply had to be. The same could be said of X, in having loved Rié and
been loved by her. Of course, this line of reasoning only went so far. While
he hated to think badly of people, Kido did not, for example, think much at
all of Rié’s previous husband.
Misuzu gazed at the picture of Daisuké Taniguchi that she’d brought
and then at the picture of X again. Strangely, Kido suddenly felt like he’d
seen X’s face somewhere before. But as he was somewhat drunk, he let the
hint of a memory slip away. And checking his watch, he asked Misuzu for
the bill, sad to have to go.
 CHAPTER FIVE

On the day that Kyoichi visited Rié’s home, she went with him to the
police, still in shock about the revelation he’d thrust upon her. As distrustful
as she was of him, she nonetheless felt it incumbent upon her to report the
alarming situation.
Although the police station was directly in front of the bus terminal
she had always used when commuting to high school, it was her first time
stepping inside. She was hurriedly relating everything to the detective just
as it happened when she began to worry about word of this bizarre event
getting out. Once the investigation kicked off, Yuto and Hana would
inevitably be drawn into it. Rumors spread instantly in a small town like
this. The story might even get picked up by the newspapers . . .
But to her surprise, such concerns turned out to have been misplaced.
For starters, the detective who saw to her was for some reason already in a
bad mood and, throughout her and Kyoichi’s scattered explanation, kept
tilting his head to the side in befuddlement.
“Huh? Then the one that died was who?” he asked when they were
finished. Without bothering to seek advice from anyone else in the station,
the only action he took was to have Kyoichi submit Daisuké’s missing
person’s report. When Rié asked how she might find out who her late
husband had been, the detective neglected to give her an answer, claiming
that the search for Daisuké had to come first.
After that, she heard nothing from the police. When she finally broke
down and called the station two weeks later, she was brusquely informed
that they had found no one matching Daisuké Taniguchi on the missing
person’s list. She tried to push them on the identity of her husband but was
told that there was “no way to investigate at the present time” and bluntly
dismissed.

With nowhere else to turn, Rié soon hit upon the idea of consulting with
Kido. This was not merely because she trusted him as a lawyer. Now that
the seven years since she returned home had suddenly lost all sense of
reality, her time in Yokohama when she lost Ryo had become the most
distinct period in her memory. And Kido had, after all, been her lone
bedrock in those days.
When Rié told him on the phone what little faith she had in the police
response, he replied in the same calm voice that she remembered.
“I doubt the police will do anything,” he said. “They already have
thousands of missing persons cases to deal with each year, so they’ll be
trying to avoid any additional headaches stemming from your late
husband’s identity. They’re basically just bureaucrats.”
Rié found this explanation flabbergasting, but she was relieved to have
someone sensible with whom she could discuss her predicament and raised
a worry that she never would have mentioned to the police. “Could my
husband have been . . . involved in some kind of crime?”
After a pause, Kido cautiously agreed that was a possibility, asked her
for more time to look into it, and left it at that.

Toward the end of February, Kido came to visit Rié in Miyazaki. They
talked in the shop’s waiting area, and when he told her he hadn’t eaten, she
took him to the local eel restaurant. It was the very same restaurant where X
had once divulged the story of Daisuké Taniguchi, but she didn’t pick it for
that reason; it was simply one of the only suitable places within walking
distance that hadn’t gone out of business. Although Rié felt she was hardly
one to talk, she observed that Kido had aged in the past seven years, with
plenty of white appearing at his temples.
“You seem busy,” she said.
 “Yes, February was quite hectic,” said Kido, smiling as he inserted his
middle fingers below his glasses and pressed the corners of his eyes. “But
it’s calmed down now.”
As they had always met at his firm in Yokohama, Rié felt strange to
have Kido in Miyazaki with her. Whenever there was a break in the
conversation, he would gaze out the window at the desolate mountain-
ringed town as though he might remain absorbed in the scene ever after.
And complimenting the food, he tidily devoured his high-grade eel along
with its bed of rice, as well as the gojiru, a hearty local soup of mashed
soybeans and miso served in place of the usual eel entrails in clear broth.
During the divorce mediation after her son’s death, Kido’s gentle
smile had soothed Rié’s heart on more than one occasion. He was a kind,
collected lawyer, and just as much the gentleman this day as all those years
ago. But she detected a subtle hint of loneliness that sometimes crept into
his expression now. He did not appear to be aware of it himself.
Kido’s first proposal was that they sort out the link between the family
registers of Rié and the Taniguchis. If X was not “Daisuké Taniguchi,” he
told her, then there was no reason for her to continue going by her married
name, and Rié quickly agreed. While she still felt somewhat sentimental
about the name Taniguchi when she thought of her late husband, she’d felt
guilty about continuing to use it ever since she met Kyoichi, as though she
were brazenly introducing herself by the name of a total stranger.
Her bigger concern was the life insurance X had taken out, but Kido
was quick to explain that there was no need to pay it back.
“Although the name ‘Daisuké Taniguchi’ is listed on the documents, it
was X who was the contracting entity from the start and X who paid the
premiums. Therefore, you can hold on to the sum you collected. There’s no
need to revise the name of the subscriber or make any changes of that kind.
And if you run into any problems, please rest assured that I’ll take care of
them.”
Since the family register that included Rié and “Daisuké Taniguchi”
listed their legal residence as Rié’s family home, Kido filed a petition for
two revisions at the Miyazaki Family Court, which had jurisdiction over the
registers of families residing in Town S. The first revision was to cancel the
removal of “Daisuké Taniguchi” due to death. This would make the census
records show him to be alive again and thereby ensure that the police were
no longer stuck with a missing person’s report for someone who was
technically dead. The second revision was to then remove all record of
“Daisuké Taniguchi” from her family register and reinstate the register
under her maiden name, Takemoto. In other words, their marriage was to be
annulled on the basis of error. The upshot of these changes would be the
complete erasure of Rié’s second marriage from her family register, thereby
making Hana, her child with X, illegitimate.
Although Kido would have usually been able to handle this procedure
on his own, given the complexity of the situation, the court asked Rié to
present herself in person and requested a DNA test to prove that X was not
Daisuké Taniguchi. So Kido collected various samples from X’s personal
effects—hair from his clothes, nails from his clippers, his electric razor, his
toothbrush—and returned home with them to Yokohama.
During the nearly half a day that Rié spent with Kido, their
conversations were wide ranging. When she asked if he had children,
remembering that he and his wife had been childless before, and learned
that he now had a son around Hana’s age, the two of them chatted at length
about parenting. When she then brought up the topic of what he had been
doing when the earthquake struck, he told her about the streets bursting
with cars and the crowds trekking home after the transportation system was
paralyzed, about the cracked buildings, about enduring the blackouts and
water stoppages, about the lull in Chinatown after its foreign workers
returned home and customers grew scarce. Rié imagined herself going
through the same ordeals in Yokohama, in a world where she’d never lost
Ryo or divorced his father. Of course, then she would never have come to
know a man who died in a logging accident in her hometown.
Kido was a good listener and this naturally led Rié to confide. As she
was gathering X’s things, she told Kido about their first meeting and
described the sort of person X had been, details that she had not gone into
on the phone. Kido studied the drawings on each page of X’s sketchbook
collection, taking pictures now and then with his phone, as he did with X’s
other personal effects—just in case, he explained. Rié watched Kido sitting
in profile and couldn’t remember the last time she had seen someone so
tranquilly lost in thought.
“These really give you a sense of his character,” said Kido. “They’re
like the work of a boy who became an adult without growing up.”
 “I know exactly what you mean. They definitely aren’t good enough
to show off. But they’re like a mirror for his heart and mind . . . They’re
exactly like him. Incredibly pure, and serious, and giving. Not the sort of
person who could ever tell lies or deceive anyone.”
Kido listened attentively, offering words of encouragement. He then
agreed to take on the investigation into X’s background for a fee so low that
Rié felt guilty.
“You’re a good person, Kido-sensei, I mean it,” Rié said quietly and
then immediately regretted being so familiar.
“It’s my job,” said Kido with a smile, leaning away from her slightly
with wide eyes.
Rié looked down, embarrassed. She had thought that Kido seemed
lonely, but now she was the one letting herself get carried away by the
intense loneliness of middle age.

Though Kido’s time in Miyazaki had been brief, Rié did in fact feel lonely
once he was gone. Not wishing he had stayed longer. Just generally wanting
to have company.
She found herself replaying what the detective had said to her in her
mind.
The one that died was who?
She would imagine replying, Who died?, and although this amounted
to the same question, she felt as though the meaning changed a little.
A life is something that you can exchange with someone else—Rié
would never have dreamed such a thing if her husband hadn’t demonstrated
it was true. He had actually led the life of another. But what about death?
Death, she felt certain, was the only thing you could never exchange with
anyone. Losing Ryo had taught her that.
Ryo had been a cheerful, energetic child, and partly thanks to all the
time he spent playing with his elder brother, Yuto, he had picked up words
at an astonishing pace. When he graduated from diapers at twenty-two
months, Rié had been just as amazed as his day care teachers, though her
husband chalked it up boastfully to his application of an early education
method he had found online.
 But just before Ryo reached his second birthday, he began to
frequently wet his bed and to pee his pants at day care. While Rié and the
teachers agreed that ending his potty training may have been a bit
premature after all and returned him to diapers without further ado, her
husband denounced Ryo’s behavior as an attention-seeking regression and
began to scold him for it, most vociferously before bed.
“This is why you piss yourself, boy!” he would say when Ryo cried
and shrieked for water at night. This became the source of repeated
arguments with Rié.
Soon, Ryo no longer seemed his usual bouncy self and began to
occasionally throw up. At first Rié suspected it was a psychological
reaction to her husband’s overbearing attitude, and his teachers arrived at
the same conclusion. But she could never tell what exactly was wrong with
her son. She would try asking him if his tummy ached. Then she would try
asking him if it didn’t. Either way, he invariably gave her the same vague
“uh-huh” in reply. All that seemed certain was that his head hurt when he
woke up in the morning.
Rié’s husband took her worries about Ryo as passive aggression
directed at him and was often in a foul mood about it. Then one day, he
uncharacteristically volunteered to pick up Ryo from day care by himself,
and on the way back, brought him to a local pediatrician without telling Rié.
“It’s just a cold,” he said when he returned, tossing the medicine he
had received with a clack onto the kitchen counter.
Reflecting back on all this, Rié remembered how her husband would
come to regret his behavior during this period. It seemed to mark a turning
point in their marriage, after which everything went wrong.
When Ryo had taken the medicine for a week and his condition failed
to improve, Rié decided to bring him to another pediatrician, this time their
usual one, but her husband did not approve.
“With you asking him, ‘Does your head hurt, does your head hurt?’ all
the time, the boy’s bound to start believing it. So if you want to call it
something psychological, well, then it’s your fault.”
Upon examining Ryo, the doctor advised them to take him
immediately to a bigger hospital and wrote them a letter of referral. This
was the first time that the possibility of a brain tumor was brought to their
attention; an MRI the following week confirmed it. The tumor was located
in Ryo’s basal ganglia, and he was diagnosed with “a typical case of
germinoma.” His bedwetting and thirst, the doctor told them, both stemmed
from the diabetes insipidus that was concomitant with this condition, but
with treatment, he could make a full recovery.
To this day, Rié regretted the way she clung with faith from then on to
that word. Recovery. Not that it was entirely her fault. The doctor had
seemed confident of his diagnosis and hadn’t explained the possibility of
glioblastoma as thoroughly as he would later claim.
It was a difficult reality to face, and Rié was surprised to find that her
husband was quicker than she was to accept it. Bravely confronting their
grim destiny was where he had located the grounding for his self-respect,
and he began to display a peculiar elation. This was his way of
compensating for all the hurt his pride had suffered at the hands of his wife
throughout their disagreements. He almost seemed invigorated.
But Rié was the one who quit her job, brought a folding cot to Ryo’s
ward, and stayed by his side, caring for him during his three months in the
hospital. Her husband did no such thing. Like her, he had been seduced by
the word “recovery.”
“Giving it a go with radiation and chemotherapy is rational,” he told
her, repeatedly insisting she didn’t understand because she was a woman
and had studied the humanities, all the while lacking the faintest inkling of
just how awful the treatment actually was.
Rié tried her best not to call up her memories of Ryo racked by
relentless vomiting. His oral inflammation had been so bad that the pain of
swallowing his own saliva was enough to make him cry, and she watched as
he grew skinnier and skinnier. Rié herself could hardly sleep or get food
down. A small woman to begin with, she lost a fifth of her body weight in
just three months. Undeterred, she went on hugging Ryo as he thrashed
about in misery, making him go through with the treatment, for she never
stopped believing in that word: “recovery.”
“Hang in there,” the doctor would say. “You are a big boy, aren’t
you?”
“Yes, sir . . . Yes, sir . . . ,” tiny Ryo would reply, sitting on the edge of
his bed with his hands in his lap, nodding earnestly. It was Ryo’s expression
of tender innocence in these moments rather than his crying scowl that Rié
remembered now, his hair fallen out, his face swollen almost beyond
recognition. He always replied this way instead of saying “yes” or “yeah”
because his father had drilled it into him. How many times had Ryo
appeared in Rié’s dreams since his death, nodding to those paternal
instructions with a “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir”?
And the despair that set in when they learned that all the suffering
they’d forced upon him was utterly pointless. If that’s how it was going to
turn out, they should have set aside the days that remained in his short life
to serve him his favorite foods, to take him to the zoo he so enjoyed, to
spoil him with whatever he asked for, to teach him the joy of living if only
briefly. Like there was ever any need for such harsh rearing. If only she
could have known! When Rié learned that “recovery” was never coming,
that Ryo would not be saved, she couldn’t breathe. It was as though a
savage, invisible hand covered her mouth and held her tight in its grasp.
The inside of her body blazed with heat and then filled with glacial cold,
and rubbing her arms and legs together erratically, all she could do was cry.
Now Rié thought she finally understood her body’s intention: to fly
into such a frenzy that all feeling ceased.

Rié could not die in Ryo’s place. While expressing the wish to die for the
sake of a sick child is something of a platitude, Rié’s desire to do so was
genuine and came upon her with excruciating force. All she could do was
pray to nothing and no one in particular for some kind of miracle. But in the
end, only Ryo could die his own death. And for Rié, there would be no
other death than the one that awaited her.
Who died? she kept asking herself in her head. According to the
family register census records, it had been a man named “Daisuké
Taniguchi.” Yet Daisuké Taniguchi should have had a death reserved for
him alone. So Rié had to wonder who her late husband had been. Or in
other words, whose death he had died.
Rié had never made a habit of such abstract philosophizing. But
thinking was essential for her now, if she was to go on living and stop
herself from going mad as her body almost had when she realized that Ryo
was gone.
 Kido called her late husband X, but Rié, even for the sake of
convenience, refused to do the same. Referring to someone by a code you
have chosen without their permission rather than by their name seemed to
her a fundamental insult to the dignity of the human being. Whenever she
heard Kido say X, it made her feel like they were discussing a stranger, and
words would slip away from her. Faltering in the middle of the
conversation, she would reflect on the sound that had just passed her by.
And she would feel fairly certain that it was supposed to refer to her
husband. But without knowing his real name, she had nothing to call him as
he receded with his back turned into the distance.

The dead cannot call out to us. All they can do is wait for us to call to them.
Except for the dead whose names are unknown. Uncalled by anyone, they
sink ever deeper into solitude.
Rié knelt facing the photo of her husband on the altar in her home, not
knowing what to say to make him turn around. During his life, she had
called him “Papa” or “Father” whenever the children were present, but had
been accustomed to calling him Daisuké-kun as soon as they were alone.
Usually she would have only used the suffix “kun” with the name of a child
or at least someone younger than her. But there was something about him,
in keeping with the juvenile vibe of his sketchbooks, that compelled her to
attach “kun” to his name, as though he were one of her classmates in
elementary school. For some reason, she also felt that the “suké” sound at
the end was just asking for it. And yet “Daisuké” was the name of a
complete stranger.
Rié tried to recall the times she had said “Daisuké-kun” when the love
for her husband had been deepest, the distance between them smallest. With
no one else there, no room for mistaking the other, no need to distinguish
them from anyone else, even then—especially then!—we call out to the
beloved by name. She wondered how he might have felt in such moments
to have his wife speak the name of another, to have her affection permeate
every nook and cranny of that name and envelop him forever in its lingering
resonance.
His name wasn’t the only problem. Rié’s late husband had also told her the
story of the man who bore it, and she had empathized deeply with the life it
bespoke.
Her husband had never wanted to talk about his childhood, and she
used to enjoy imagining what it might have been like. Suppose they had
been the same age and went to the same school. Would it have taken a
whole year, until they moved up to the next grade, for them to have a proper
conversation? After all, he would have been the quiet, serious type who
went off during lunch to a secluded spot removed from the main class
clique to play contentedly. The type who, in later years, was excluded by
default from talk of crushes and other gossip but who had no qualms
whatsoever about being left out. The type who, in spite of this
inconspicuousness, appears out of the blue in the reminiscing mind’s eye of
former classmates, even more vivid somehow than the kids they played
with on a daily basis, summoned by the nostalgia clinging to their memory.
Even after they were married, he remained gentle and generous.
Although he spoke little, his expression was always mild and he never
raised his voice to Rié or the children. The exact opposite of her previous
husband, who tended to be irritable after Yuto’s birth and consequently
overlooked the odd changes that eventually afflicted Ryo.
Rié thought she had never been happier than during the three years
and nine months of married life with him. But when she looked back on her
memories of that time, they spun precariously like a top, falling over with
his abrupt end and moving no more. If he had remained alive, Rié might
never have noticed the contradictions that arose from the false story he had
told, just as a blot of dirt on a top looks like a perfect circle as long as it
keeps spinning. Those years had left their mark in every part of her body,
and it terrified her to think that lurking inside she might find an uncanny
face that actually matched the barren moniker, X.
There had to be a good reason he had done this. That’s what she
wanted to believe. But why didn’t he tell her? He’d had four and a half
years from the time they met to do it. They had trusted each other enough. It
wasn’t as if he hadn’t had the opportunity.
 Facing his photo, Rié always stared into his eyes and wished there was
a name by which she could call him. Could mendacious sincerity,
consummately performed, be the ultimate deception?
 CHAPTER SIX

Kido had warned Rié that the court ruling on their petition to annul Daisuké
Taniguchi’s death and restore Rié’s maiden name to her family register
could take anywhere from two months to a year. If the latter was rejected,
they would have to sue for a declaratory judgment of the invalidation of her
marriage. But as it turned out, both petitions were approved five months
later, around the first week of August.
With the DNA test providing definitive evidence that X was not
Daisuké Taniguchi, Rié’s second marriage was erased from the records. Her
past now corrected, she was no longer a widow and had only been married
once.
The error hadn’t simply been one of bureaucratic procedure. It was her
actions that had been in error. She had come to the false belief that she had
married someone named Daisuké Taniguchi, who she had never even met,
publicly declared this to everyone around her, and illegitimately notified the
government of his death despite having no idea what this person might be
doing or where. When she thought about this, she felt a sort of mystified
harrowing sadness, and lost all concrete sense of whose life she herself was
leading.

“Mama,” said Hana in her still-babyish voice. “I kept trying to wake Yuto.
But he won’t get up!”
“Oh,” said Rié, looking over her shoulder at Hana as she fried eggs
sunny-side up. “He’s not up yet?”
It was the morning of the opening ceremony for Yuto’s fall semester,
and Rié was making breakfast.
 “This I think,” said Hana. She had developed the habit of prefacing
her opinions with this phrase, a sort of anastrophe that mixed up the word
order of Japanese. As she invariably did after saying this, Hana paused for a
moment, swallowed, and glanced obliquely upward to gather her thoughts.
Rié found this quirk hilarious and always broke into a smile as she waited
for her daughter to continue.
“Yuto is still sleepy because he slept in every morning over summer
break,” Hana conjectured, her eyes crescents of amusement.
Next month Hana would be five. Until recently, she had been known
to everyone as “the Puffy Tot.” Although Hana had never been fat on the
whole, her arms and legs had been so plump ever since she was born that
people found touching them irresistible and immediately discovered that
they had a certain “puffy” feel to them for which there was no comparison
on earth. But she had since learned to walk, and with all the scampering
around that she did at day care each day, her infantile physique had
gradually tightened up until, within the past year, that extra padding had
disappeared altogether. Now that the nickname no longer stuck, Rié
doubted that Hana even remembered it.
Children developed entirely too fast, immediately outgrowing
whatever seemed to define them as individuals. Rié had come to know
Ryo’s personality traits—his quick comprehension, his perseverance, his
charm, his timidity—and now that he was gone, she was painfully uncertain
what they might have signified. Looking at Hana now, Rié could see that
she was becoming more and more like her father by the day, at least on the
outside. While her nose showed signs of growing long unlike the nose of
either of her parents, her eyes were very much like his—but these were the
features of a man whose identity was still unknown. And suddenly Rié felt
the warmth drain out of her cheeks as a sort of foreboding came over her.
Putting the eggs on a plate and spreading jam and butter on Hana’s
toast, she said, “Hana, I’m just going to go wake him up. Can you go ahead
and start eating? Grandma should be crawling out of bed soon to join you.”
“OK!” said Hana.
When Rié entered Yuto’s room on the second floor, she found him in
bed, wrapped up in a light cotton blanket with the air-conditioning on.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Have you caught a cold?”
 Too worried to wait for his reply, Rié sat down on the edge of his bed
and put her hand on his back. Yuto was facing the wall and now curled his
body up even tighter. When Rié reached out to touch his forehead, he buried
his face in his pillow, but she found enough of it to tell that he didn’t have a
fever.
“You need to tell your mother if you’re not feeling well. We’ve got to
take you to the doctor.”
“. . . I’m fine.”
“Oh yeah?”
After a pause, Yuto roused himself and sat up slowly.
“Mom, you worry too much,” he said, scratching his tousled head,
eyes downcast. “I’m not Ryo. You freak out every time I have a bit of a
headache or a cold. I’m me. My brother was my brother.”
Rié let out a small sigh and nodded.
“You’re completely right, Yuto, but can you expect me to behave any
differently after what I went through? You’re just going to have to accept
that my anxiety isn’t going anywhere and learn how to handle it.”
Lifting his head, Yuto gave her an exasperated smile. Rié reminded
herself that, already at his age, he had lost three close family members. On
the surface, the aloofness toward death typical of someone so young
seemed to have protected him from deep psychological scarring. But even if
that were true, his childhood was a far cry from Rié’s happy one. The idea
that he might reach adulthood without having any issues suddenly struck
her as naive.
“Are you really OK?”
“Yeah . . . There’s nothing wrong with my body, anyway.”
“What is it then? Your mood?”
Yuto remained still as though in thought. Already he was taller than
her and had pimples on his cheeks.
“Go on.”
Yuto scratched his head again, brushed his hands over his face, bit his
lip, and searched for words. “I . . . I’ve decided that I don’t want to change
my name . . . Can’t we stick with Taniguchi?”
Why didn’t I realize what was behind his sulking sooner? she thought.
How foolish of me. Not long ago, she had announced without explanation
that she would be switching back to her maiden name, and should have
noticed something was up when Yuto merely nodded, acknowledging the
news with seeming indifference.
“When I was born, we were the Yonedas. Then you got divorced and
we became the Takemotos. When I started elementary school, we became
the Taniguchis . . . Now I’m in middle school. All my friends, the older
students, the younger students, everyone calls me Taniguchi, and you’re
telling me we’re going back to Takemoto again? Like, maybe you’re used
to Takemoto, Mother, but for me it just feels like Grandma and Grandpa’s
name. So, like, it’s weird, OK . . . Having to go around being like, ‘No, it’s
Takemoto’ every time someone calls me Taniguchi would just suck . . .”
“I see what you mean.”
“And if you marry someone else, my last name is going to change
again! I don’t even want a last name anymore.” Yuto made a show of
slapping his knees, wearing a histrionic, fed-up smile.
“I’m done marrying. I’m all married out.”
The first time Rié got married, she didn’t think twice about the fact
that her name would change, at least insofar as it was her husband’s name.
But she remembered the intense dissonance she had felt the moment it
dawned on her, while surrounded by in-laws at her husband’s family home,
that she shared that name with these other people too. And every time she
returned to her hometown during that period, she would think longingly of
the name Takemoto that lay dormant inside her. Although the situation with
her second husband had been completely different, a similar discomfort had
probably contributed to her knee-jerk aversion to Kyoichi. Such
experiences made her wonder if there might even be people out there who,
unable to love their biological parents, could not feel that the name they
were born with was their own . . .
“Mom, have you already forgotten Dad?”
“Of course not.”
“Then when are you going to make a grave for him? His ashes have
been in the urn forever. You hardly even talk about him anymore. It’s
messed up, Mom.”
Rié didn’t know what to say.
“When you go back to Takemoto, you’ll let me stay Yuto Taniguchi,
won’t you? It’s . . . it’s just not right to do this to Dad. His family turned
their backs on him and now what if we forget him too?”
 The whir of the decrepit air conditioner accentuated the charged
stillness of the morning, and suddenly Yuto seemed grown-up to her. His
voice had begun to change a few weeks earlier, after growing hoarse on
their family trip to Beppu during the Obon Festival. Over the course of their
brief conversation, the sun shining in through the seam in the curtains had
grown noticeably brighter, spurring on the rising pitch of the cicadas.
Relaxing her firmly pursed lips, Rié sighed feebly.
“Yuto, what sort of person would you say your father was?” she asked.
“Huh?” said Yuto, caught off guard. “A really nice guy, I guess. You
don’t think so?”
“No. I agree.”
“Even when he scolded me, he’d sit me down to explain what I did
wrong and listen to what I had to say . . . I think he was a better person than
my old dad. I know I’m related to him. But I just wish my second dad was
my real dad. Hana is so lucky.”
After Rié remarried, Yuto never used the phrase “real dad.” Still only
eight at the time, he instead parroted Rié in calling his biological father his
“old dad.” But eventually, out of affection for his “second dad,” or perhaps
out of consideration for Rié, he seemed to come to the resolution never to
use the phrase. For to do otherwise would be to implicitly deny that his
second dad was his real dad.
When Rié intuited her son’s thought process about this, she adored
him even more. It demonstrated a thoughtfulness beyond his years. How
fitting that he seemed to have picked up this strength of character not
through heredity from his old dad but through the influence of his second.
“Your father took great care of you, didn’t he, Yuto?”
“I . . . Since Dad died, I . . . I’m not sad anymore. Grandma has been
so nice to me. But, like, . . .” Yuto smiled in embarrassment. “I come home
every day with all these things I want to ask him and . . . I miss him . . .”
At last Yuto burst out crying. While sobs racked his shoulders, Rié
gently stroked his back, growing teary-eyed along with him.
“You really loved your father, huh, Yuto.”
“Mom . . . Mom, I know there has to be some reason you’re doing
this, but if I stop being Taniguchi . . . it’s like he’ll no longer be my dad
anymore . . . I’ll be nothing but the child of my old dad . . . and my second
dad will be nothing but the husband from your second marriage . . . and
Hana will be his child, and her dad will be different from mine . . .”
Bent over as he was, Rié could only see his flushed cheeks as tears
went on pattering into his lap. She hadn’t seen him cry so much since his
dad’s funeral.
“Oh, look. Now what do we have here? It’s little Hana all by her
lonesome.” Rié heard her mother’s voice coming from the first floor.
“Where’s Mommy? Upstairs? . . . Riééé. You’ve left Hana to eat alone?”
“I’ll be right there!”
Yuto kept wiping his bloodshot eyes as he stifled the spasms in his
chest.
“You can keep Taniguchi, Yuto—alright? But a bunch of things
happened and for legal reasons I had to go back to Takemoto . . . I’ll explain
everything. I’m sorry I haven’t been clear with you, sweetheart. It’s just that
it’s kind of complicated . . .”
Rié realized that she had to fill him in sooner rather than later. While
she had been planning to wait until the truth had at least become clear, there
was no telling when that might happen. But how would he react when he
learned about his beloved father’s lies?
Yuto had already intuited that his mother was hiding something. So
when she said that the situation was “complicated,” he decided that his
vague premonition about her getting married for the third time had to be
true as well. When Yuto told Rié about this later, she would be taken aback
that he would leap to such a conclusion. It only made sense when he
explained that her recent outing with Kido and her furtive conversations
with him on the phone had set off his alarm bells.
The outline of Yuto’s flushed face gently warped and swelled in Rié’s
moist eyes. Without a word, he nodded, rose from the bed, and went to open
the curtains. Then, gazing outside, he roughly brushed away his tears once
again. At such moments as these, when Rié saw that one of her surviving
children was growing up, she always reminded herself to be strong and
keep moving forward.
 CHAPTER SEVEN

“So you bought that ring for yourself?”

“Yes.”
“Not for your daughter?”
“For me . . . yes.”
“But you gave it to her to hold on to?”
“Only because when I let her hold it, she looked really cute and happy
and stopped crying. It was just that one time.”
“In other words, you knew that your daughter was holding the ring in
her hand and you let her, is that right?”
“Just that one time, like I said. Only when I was watching her . . .
yes.”
“You didn’t use the ring as a soother to make your daughter stop
crying?”
“I would never! Nope. The person who made it should have warned
me to be careful that small children might put it in their mouths. It doesn’t
matter if the ring was meant for adults. If a young woman buys it, it’s
common she’ll have kids in the house. For a university student to think he
can go making and selling something like that is just irresponsible!”
“I present to the plaintiff exhibit five, a photograph taken inside her
residence. Are those magnets in your living room?”
“Yes.”
“They’re not your daughter’s toys?”
“What? No, they’re not . . .”
“And the magnets are placed out of your child’s reach?”
“. . . Yes.”
“Are there other rings in your house besides the one at issue?”
 “. . . Yes . . .”
“And earrings as well?”
“. . . Yes.”
“And you always keep those rings and earrings out of your child’s
reach?”
“. . .”
“What is your answer?”
“Yes.”
“So that your daughter won’t swallow them by mistake, correct?”
“. . . Well, that’s . . .”
“But you placed the ring at issue within your child’s reach?”
“. . .”
“And you didn’t just place it there, you gave it to her to hold on to,
correct?”
“. . . Like I . . . Yes, that’s right . . .”
“That’s all.”

Having completed his oral argument for a civil suit at the Yokohama
District Court that morning, Kido was having lunch in Chinatown with
Nakakita, one of his partners at the firm. A freshly stir-fried plate of sweet-
and-sour black vinegar pork rested on the table in front of him. His tongue
hurt, as he seemed to have burned it when absentmindedly shoveling the
food in.
“I was already amazed that that lawyer would get her to sue for that,
but boy, did he ever look like a villain,” said Nakakita. “What year do you
think he got his license? I’ve never seen him before.”
“The media turnout was quite something,” said Kido. “And the
internet is in an uproar with the hashtag ‘parental mishap,’ the poor
plaintiff. She absolutely refuses to settle and she’s bound to lose her case.
When I think about the prospects of a single mother like her looking after a
kid with brain damage . . . well, it really brings me down.”
The lawsuit was filed after a baby girl choked on a ring that her
mother had purchased online from a graduate student, who had been selling
accessories he produced with a 3D printer in the lab at his school in
Fujisawa. Although the girl’s life had been saved, she was left with severe
brain damage, and the mother was suing for millions.
The chic, vibrant rings, studs, chokers, and other items that the
defendant made had impressed Kido when he first saw them. Recently, the
young man had branched out into promotional novelties for events, and
over the past year his sales had grown steadily. Considering the time and
effort he put into his work, his profits had been modest, but he had had a
long-term vision of becoming a designer and making a living off his
creations. Meanwhile, he had neglected to take out product liability
insurance, a no-brainer for any corporation in the same industry. He didn’t
even know he was required to file a tax return for business earnings over a
set amount.
Kido felt sorry for the defendant. Every time they met, he burst into
tears at the thought of the asphyxiated child. Like the plaintiff, he had been
doxed and was now mentally unstable, claiming that he would never sell
accessories again. It seemed a shame to Kido that he would lose the outlet
for his talents in this way. Such a legal outcome also struck him as unfair.
In court, Kido had challenged the plaintiff, arguing that the design of
the accessories was not lacking in the level of safety one could reasonably
expect as the student had not originally envisaged them being used as
children’s toys, and pointing out that the plaintiff had a number of other
knickknacks at home of comparable size and shape. The plaintiff’s lawyer
insisted that failing to attach a detailed written warning counted as a defect,
but Kido didn’t believe that the student’s labelling requirements were that
onerous. While he conceded a certain degree of persuasiveness to the
general position that responsibility for such hobbyist products should be
interrogated for the sake of security in society going forward, there was a
limit to how far such an inquisition could be taken in court.
Nakakita had decided to try the twice-cooked pork curry, an unusual
specialty said to be a recent hit at the restaurant, and did not look
disappointed as he devoured it with gusto, sweat beading his forehead.
“By the by,” he said, “that Supreme Court ruling about the inheritance
disparity for extramarital children reminded me, how’s the case in Miyazaki
going?”
Some years Kido’s senior, Nakakita was the sort of man who seemed
like everyone’s elder brother, at once inspiring reverence and fondness.
With a sparse, downy five o’clock shadow on sunken cheeks that endowed
him with an unlawyerly allure, he played drums in a band in his spare time.
Although this and his family duties seemed to keep him busy, he liked
criminal cases and continued to take on plenty even at his advancing age,
sticking obstinately to the letter of the law no matter how tragic the
circumstances. His band played in the style of The Gadd Gang, and on the
several occasions that Kido had gone out to hear them, Nakakita’s steady
rhythm had felt rife with personality. As Kido himself had played bass in a
band back in university, they had hit it off as soon as they’d met. So when
Kido had been establishing the firm, Nakakita was the first person he
reached out to.
“The notifications of death and marriage for the man who was
impersonated have been annulled,” Kido replied.
“Oh yeah? Well, I guess that’s about all you can do, huh?”
“Yes, though partly out of personal interest, I’m continuing to
investigate his whereabouts as well as the identity of X.”
“It sure makes you curious—hey, what kind of music did they listen
to? You can’t fake taste in music.”
“Oh . . . I wonder about X. I know he was into drawing pictures.
Apparently Daisuké Taniguchi liked Michael Schenker. Thought he was
God, according to his ex.”
“Then I can guarantee you he’s a good dude,” said Nakakita with a
laugh.
“What makes you so sure?”
“No one living in the boonies in that era who cried to the wicked
guitar licks of Schenker could have been bad. Trust me.”
“You used to listen to that kind of music too? I never would have
guessed.”
“Come on. It was the eighties—you know those bands are still at it,
coming on tour to Japan and everything? Our guitarist went to a show in a
fit of nostalgia and said it was a real blast from the past. Though it sounds
like the audience was all hags and geezers. If you go to the concert halls,
who knows, maybe you’ll find that Taniguchi guy.”
“Huh . . . I never would have thought of that.”
“Well, taste in music changes like everything else, but good memories
stick with you. You could try checking one of the fan pages. You never
know. Maybe he’ll be hanging around.”
Kido crossed his arms and thought about this for a while. Nakakita
had finished his curry and soon asked the server for more water.
“How about the other case?” he said. “That death-by-overwork suit.”
“The first hearing is in October so I’m taking down the accounts of the
parties involved and, well, various things . . .”
The family of a twenty-seven-year-old restaurant employee who killed
himself after being forced to work an unconscionably long shift was suing
the company and the management. Although Kido had been regularly
handling approximately fifty cases of late, he found this to be one of the
most emotionally taxing.
“Sounds like the case is tiring you out.”
“Is it ever . . . I’m only able to cope because it doesn’t involve me
personally. I still have to tell myself that after all these years.”
“It’s a basic truth about the job. Remind me—did you end up going
anywhere last summer?”
Kido shook his head. He meant to keep his lips sealed, but words
spilled out that even he didn’t expect. “Things are not going well at home at
the moment.”
As Kido hardly ever discussed his personal life, this abrupt confession
left Nakakita wide-eyed, his lips protruding.
From the outside looking in, the lack of conversation between Kido
and Kaori that had imperceptibly established itself as a fixture of their daily
routine was the very picture of a typical marriage slump and nothing more.
To Kido on the inside, it felt transparent and tranquil, like water in a glass.
A single sip should have been all it took for either of them to bring the
awkwardness to an end, except that the water had been left out for too long
and was no longer drinkable. Now, a sliver of ice had fallen in with the
slightest splash and disturbance on the surface—nothing toxic, just ice that
quickly melted, spreading a new chill through the silence and sustaining the
memory of it forever.
The problem owed its origin to Kaori’s suspicions about Kido’s trip to
Miyazaki. In part because he was required to maintain the confidentiality of
his clients, Kido rarely talked about work at home, and Kaori, in any case,
showed zero interest. So until then, when either of them had to stay
overnight in another city, all they had to do was say “work” and the matter
was settled. But for no reason Kido could discern, something about this trip
had seemed fishy to her.
At first, Kido had laughed and dismissed it as paranoia. Later, he
began to worry that she might be stressed out about something else. When
he suggested this to her, Kaori denied it, but there was a shift in her after
that. Instead of directing her thorny silence unrelentingly at Kido, she began
to come down with unusual harshness on their son. This Kido could not
abide, and he eventually lost his temper, dragged by feeble anger over the
bounds of his self-control without even the impetus for a full-blown
outburst. The lesson he took away was that he wasn’t his usual collected
self when confronting his wife.
He knew Kaori had no justification for thinking anything had
happened with Rié. Even supposing she had taken a peek at his cell phone,
there was nothing in their exchanges to invite misunderstanding. So her
concern about his trip could only mean she had a hunch that something
might happen between them. The very idea was foolish on too many levels
to count.
“If I were to get involved with a client, I would be reprimanded,” he
had said, trying his best to maintain a light tone and keep from looking
stern. He had wanted to tell her that she lacked respect for his work but
decided not to go that far.
Even with his marital troubles flashing through his mind, Kido was
reluctant to describe them to Nakakita. But as Nakakita appeared to be
waiting patiently for him to follow up on his confession, Kido decided to
approach the topic from a different angle.
“My wife seems to have this vague notion that problems between a
husband and wife can be traced to disagreements in their fundamental
philosophy, though I doubt she’s used that word with any seriousness in her
entire life.”
Nakakita frowned. “You mean in a political sense?”
“No . . . That might be what it boils down to, but I’m referring to
something more basic than that. I mean, she didn’t vote in the upper house
election in July. I can’t convince her to vote at all.”
“I hear you.”
“As a Zainichi, I’m aware of the importance of the right to political
participation, but if I try to tell her that . . . well, she thinks I’m being self-
righteous. Ever since our child was born, she doesn’t seem to want to
acknowledge my heritage—if I’d dragged her kicking and screaming to the
polls, I bet she’d have voted for the LDP without blinking in any case, even
in the last election.”
“What does her family do, again?”
“Her father is a dentist. Her brother is a physician.”
“Oh yeah. You told me.”
“I felt really bad about having to cut short my volunteer work after the
earthquake. That was the first time my wife and I had a serious fight. She
said it was hypocritical to leave your wife and child alone to go help other
mothers and children, even if they were voluntary evacuees. As if I had the
time for that when my hands should have been full already taking care of
my own family. But I got absolutely nowhere when I suggested she go
volunteer while I looked after our son. She has no interest in volunteering.
She claimed that she’d be too worried if she was apart from him.”
“Your boy is still pretty young.”
“Sure. And I can understand her concern. The buildings around here
took a lot of damage, and with the power shortages and aftershocks, we
were psychologically exhausted. On the city’s new hazard map, our
building is directly in the tsunami zone. When I consider the earthquake
they’re predicting here, the Nankai Trough earthquake, and all the rest, it
makes me wonder if it’s OK for us to stay in our condo.”
“Same with us. There’s something about earthquake risk that just
doesn’t stir you to act. We stock up on disaster goods, but I don’t think we’d
actually move.”
“So I conceded her point. You can never know when an earthquake
might come. I was offering pro bono legal advice once or twice a month,
but I had to call it off.”
“You did plenty. With a young child like yours, the timing just wasn’t
right.”
“Well, maybe it’s wrong of me to label what she says in an emergency
situation her philosophy. The idea that there might be a connection between
loving someone and their philosophy never even crossed my mind when I
was young. It’s hard to say if I was overvaluing love or undervaluing
philosophy.”
 “Love and philosophy . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more
youngsters nowadays who make that connection right from the start.”
“Indeed,” Kido said with a nod and took the shift in topic as an
opportunity to speak no further. He had wanted to conclude by wryly
mentioning that his marriage had been sexless ever since, but was dismayed
to find the words catching in his throat. Ashamed of himself and jealous of
happier couples, he imagined living out his days with an unsatiated sex
drive and felt vaguely sad.

As Nakakita needed to return to court in the afternoon, Kido parted with

him in Chinatown and began to walk toward the Kannai Station area, where
the firm was located. He was surprised to find that his forehead wasn’t
sweaty, his dry hairline a sign that the summer was fading.
In the park by Yokohama Stadium, he saw mothers pushing strollers
and salarymen eating baked goods on a bench. With the firm, the court, and
his home all too close together for comfort, he viewed this local scenery
regularly—the clusters of stubby high-rises, the restaurant stretch, the
gingko trees—from multiple perspectives: as a lawyer, as a husband, as a
father. At that moment he looked around with an indeterminate gaze that
was none of these. And as he turned over the conversation with Nakakita in
his mind, his thoughts turned to the day he had first gone to Miyazaki to
meet Rié.
As it had been baseball spring training season, the only vacant room
he could find was a double at the Sheraton Grande Ocean Resort, which had
been one of the factors that made Kaori suspicious. The room was indeed
too good for a regular business trip, and as he was looking down from his
window onto the golf course, absorbed in the sea and sky beyond, the idea
of spending the night there alone began to feel empty.
For a time, he lounged on the bed. The stark white sheets stiffly
wrapping the mattress like a uniform on a body seemed to be waiting for
someone to tear them off with reckless, scrabbling hands. Eventually he
took off his glasses and stretched out on his back. He tried to recall all the
ceilings he’d ever looked up at with his heart pounding, his breath deep and
pleasant, his skin naked and sweaty, and obscene images rose in his mind’s
eye. The bridled tranquility seemed to demand someone by his side with
whom to exchange the feeling of heat from their unclothed flesh.
Presently he shook off these pointless fantasies with a sigh, went down
to the ground-floor restaurant for their specialty—fried chicken with tartar
sauce—and took a taxi into the city center for a drink. Although the night
was slightly chilly, he strolled in only jeans and a light jacket. Kido was
hardly new to travelling for work. And yet this time, his being not even a
tourist steeped him in the sense that he was no one. To everyone in this city,
he was a complete stranger. Not that Yokohama was all that different in this
regard, but there was something even more unfamiliar about here. And this
state of anonymity felt simply wonderful.
As he walked through a shopping arcade, several parlors of the sort he
had sampled in his twenties passed along the edges of his vision. Although
he’d never developed a hankering for them and had eventually lost interest,
he began to slow down in front of one of their tacky lit-up signs. Suddenly
—as though, yes, he were someone other than himself—Kido felt that he
was meant to go inside. He read the description on the sign and looked over
the pictures of girls with lightened hair. Then, with the idea still smoldering
inside him, he coasted onward and arrived at the bar he had looked up in
advance.
The décor was classy, with illuminated exotic plants on display
beneath the see-through counter, and a multiplicity of whiskey and liqueur
bottles magnificent in the lush green glow. Already tired, Kido had been
planning to show up around eight o’clock and return to the hotel after one
or two drinks. But he would later be surprised to find himself drinking
alone past midnight.
During the entire time he was there, the counter was devoid of other
patrons. While the tables were only sparsely occupied, he could hear a buzz
of rowdy voices spilling from the door to the private room at the back every
time it opened. This party kept the server busy rushing back and forth with
beer and snacks. When several huge men lumbered in late, Kido realized
they were professional baseball players in the midst of training. As he had
no interest in baseball and couldn’t name even the players on the Yokohama
BayStars, he had no idea what team they were on, but from the suggestive
looks the server shot him, he gathered that they were famous.
 Classic jazz albums like Kind of Blue and Portrait in Jazz played at a
subdued volume. For his first drink, Kido ordered a vodka gimlet,
remembering Misuzu. His drink of choice for a long time had been a
balalaika, but he’d ordered a gimlet on impulse that night in Arakicho and
found himself unable to go back to the sweetness of Cointreau ever since,
even though he’d sworn by it since he was a young man.
The bartender was a man who looked to be a few years older than
Kido. Although he brandished his shaker with flair, preposterously, he used
store-bought lime juice rather than squeezing it fresh, resulting in a
superlatively foul cocktail. With this, Kido’s impression of Misuzu as a
mean mixer of gimlets synergized in his mind with her languid carefree
vibe, casting her in an even more beguiling light.
For his second drink, he ordered Stalinskaya, a rare offering, and took
it straight. Well chilled and refreshing, it spread more fully across the palate
than expected and he wished he had started with it. With one more
exhalation, he was fully immersed in the pleasant strangeness of being in
Miyazaki alone.
“Are you visiting from outside the prefecture?” asked the bartender,
when the orders from the back room had finally slowed down.
“Yes. Can you guess?”
“I sure can. Near Tokyo?”
Kido nodded and drained his glass, his gaze pausing on the smattering
of droplets at the bottom that would no doubt fail to reach his tongue even if
he tilted it back. Then, not feeling particularly drunk, he began to say at a
slow and steady pace, “I’m from Gunma originally. Ikaho Onsen.”
“Huh. Is that right. Supposed to be a famous hot springs area, I hear.
Can’t say I’ve ever been there myself.”
“I’m not surprised. Why go all that way with so many great hot
springs right here in Kyushu? My elder brother inherited the family inn. I
left home because I’m the second son. I never got along well with my
family anyway.”
This abrupt outpouring of personal information seemed to throw the
bartender off for a moment, so Kido gave him a smile. He wondered if X
had arrived in this town as Daisuké Taniguchi and related this past like it
was his own in the same way, feeling out the comfort of his new life as
though trying on a garment or test-driving a car.
 “Same with my folks,” said the bartender with a gentle, understanding
look as he dried a glass. “I don’t talk about this much with first-time
customers, but they were in construction. Just like with you, my elder
brother took over the business.”
The bartender explained that he was the manager of the bar and passed
Kido his card.
“Sorry, I just ran out of mine,” said Kido. “My name is Taniguchi.
Daisuké Taniguchi.”
The bartender, of course, didn’t doubt him for a second. Already, Kido
felt a kind of special relationship budding between him and this man he’d
just met. He was no longer a complete stranger in the town. Now, if he were
walking around and crossed paths with this bartender, they would probably
nod to each other in startled recognition.
Kido ordered another glass of Stalinskaya and continued to relate
Daisuké Taniguchi’s past as though it were his own. Just like X that
afternoon with Rié, he talked in a detached tone as though of events long
ago, mixing in a woeful grin now and again as he described how his
agreement to be the organ donor had finally led to an irreparable break with
his family. With hardly any awareness that this was a performance, Kido
felt, to the contrary, that in speaking these words he drew ever closer to
unity with them.
“That’s tough, my friend,” the bartender would say occasionally,
showing empathy but not overdoing it—a true professional. That night,
Kido felt as though he could have kept on going like this until he’d drunk
himself under the table in tears.

While waiting for a stoplight, Kido gazed at the cars passing in front of
him. Suddenly he found himself wondering what would happen if he was
fatally hit by one of them as Daisuké Taniguchi. In the deep, secluded
recesses of that mountain forest, at the instant the cryptomeria fell to take
X’s life, what thoughts might have crossed his mind?
Even after returning to Yokohama, Kido’s memory of his inexpressible
joy during those two hours impersonating X stayed with him. He had felt
nervous and excited and dizzy. It was an experience most people know as
the effect of tragedy, but in place of watching tragic movies or reading
tragic books, Kido now saw the potential for a new sort of hobby in
synchronizing himself with the life story of another so as to vicariously
inhabit their inner world. Admittedly, a shameless game with a bitter
aftertaste.
And yet, upon his recent return to Miyazaki, though he quietly
nurtured the wish to become the self he had left downtown that night—the
continuation of the life of X impersonating Daisuké Taniguchi—he couldn’t
bring himself to return to the bar. For he’d met Rié the next day and, seeing
her distress over the truth of X’s identity again, felt guilty for taking
pleasure in his little masquerade. It seemed unlikely that he’d get the same
kick out of it if he went back now. And besides, there was almost nothing
left that he needed to say as Daisuké Taniguchi.

Kido had no idea what X’s reasons might have been, but it seemed that he
had, in his one and only life, led the lives of two people, resolving to wash
his hands of the first and kick off a completely new phase as the second.
There were two things about X that Kido was unable to fathom. First
was his ability to throw everything away. Of this, Kido was vaguely jealous,
for no matter how weary he grew of his current life, it was simply not in
him to do the same. Again and again, while bathing in an outdoor hot spring
bath at the Sheraton, he had thought about how much his son would enjoy it
there. Had X possessed no comparable joy in his former life that would
have made it worth sustaining? If not, then he was of a kind with Daisuké
Taniguchi, who had sloughed off his past to be rid of the family inseparably
bound to it, choosing to give up on hating them in order to dissociate from
them out of an even more consuming hatred. Could X, in adopting this past
and tracing its course into the future, have found some sort of redemption?
The second thing that Kido could not fathom was the way that X went
on deceiving Rié to the last. For the love between them seemed to Kido far
more beautiful and pure than any he had known. If death had not found X
suddenly, was he planning to one day own up? Was it not that very
mendacious past that made Rié fall for him in commiseration after all the
pain she herself had borne? Even supposing everything else X had said was
false, if there was one moment in which he was going to be absolutely
honest, shouldn’t it have been when he opened his lips to speak in that
restaurant? Could his lie have been absolved by the true love they
eventually shared?
True love?
 CHAPTER EIGHT

Kido received word that a lawyer friend had died suddenly of ischemic
heart failure, and in mid-September, just after Respect for the Aged Day, he
went to Osaka to attend the wake.
Now, riding the final Nozomi back to Tokyo that night, Kido gazed
from his window and zoned out on the passing scenery. The interior of the
bullet train had looked somehow grotesque under the weight of his
exhaustion and the sharp fluorescent lights. While many passengers dozed,
several drunken groups chattered incessantly. The air in the car was
stagnant and heavy, laced with the stench of workday sweat, beer, and some
pungent junk food, perhaps dried squid. Kido’s suit was tinged with the
added scent of the incense he had burned for his friend.
He and the deceased had been legal apprentices together in Kyoto,
starting at the same time. Kido was now at the age where relatives and
acquaintances passed away with some frequency, but as most of those were
seniors, he was accustomed to wakes for those who had slipped away
quietly. The ceremony for his all-too-young friend had taken a toll on him.
The man should have had so much more life ahead. His surviving wife and
two elementary-age daughters had wept all the way through, and Kido
regretted his failure to give them any meaningful words of condolence. In
retrospect, his friend had probably verged on obese, but had treated the
issue lightly, sometimes rubbing his belly and swearing with a laugh that he
would diet. No one had thought his weight anything to be concerned about.
As soon as Kido left the funeral home, the reality of his friend’s death
seemed to dissolve back into the dizzying incredulity he’d felt the moment
he first heard the news.
 What would happen if I died? Kido wondered, and imagined the shock
on his son’s face when his mother told him the news.
“Daddy is dead?” he saw Sota say, not even understanding his
question.
“That’s right, son,” Kido would be unable to reply. In his own
absence, he could not very well teach his child the meaning of death,
breaking it down as he would have with any other difficult topic. Kido
really didn’t want to die. He simply couldn’t. And suddenly he found words
for the nebulous mood that had permeated his mind ever since the
earthquake: existential anxiety.
I’m afraid to die, he thought. The instant he died—and not a moment
later!—his consciousness would cease, and he would be incapable of
thinking or feeling anything ever again, leaving time to proceed with no
connection to him, passing solely for the sake of the living. Trying to
imagine this pushed Kido’s mind to its limit. Here he was, alive today, with
a world persisting for him, when the more than fifteen thousand people
who’d lost their lives in the tsunami two years earlier could perceive
nothing of what was occurring in the present. They had left no trace of
anything substantial with which they might participate in it. Not in this
world, and probably not in the afterlife or anywhere else . . . Kido’s fear of
the same thing happening to him made him painfully sensitive to the
minutiae of life.
This was not the first time he had pondered such issues. Why were
they resurfacing now after all these years, when his former attempts to think
them through had all but faded from memory? The last time had been when
he was a teenager. As was typical of someone that age, in the process of
trying to decide what he wanted to be, he had thought long and hard about
what kind of person he was. In the end he had drifted along and become a
lawyer in accordance with his father’s advice. His doubts about whether this
was truly the right path had never completely left him, but he went on
looking to the future, telling himself that the person he was meant to be
would be realized through the profession he had chosen. In other words, he
had asked who he was in order to live, and on the basis of what he
discovered had found hope as well as fear.
For fifteen years now, Kido had left it at that. Whenever he reflected
on those former days of philosophizing, he saw them as a developmental
stage that he had, thankfully, already overcome. “Thankfully” because
steady work was no longer as common as it once had been, and many in his
generation were denied the opportunity. He understood the struggles such
people faced all too well because he dealt with many of them as clients.
Forced to accept a life in which their social position and income were
always unstable, they could never hope to self-actualize through their
profession as he had.
But what had he really found? It was no longer clear to him. For the
trauma of the earthquake had thrown him back into uncertainty and
reawakened the question that he had thought long resolved. Who am I?
Except it was not a simple repeat of the words that had perplexed him in his
youth. Although the meaning of the question had hardly changed, its form
had evolved in keeping with his age. Now he asked, Did I make the right
choice?
As was typical of someone in middle age, Kido saw his life as
composed of several stages linked together by a shared name, with himself
as their culmination. A significant portion of the life given continuity by the
label “Akira Kido” that had once lain ahead had already been relegated to
the past, and so his identity was in large part already determined. Of course
there might have been other paths he could have taken and therefore other
people he might have been. Perhaps an infinite number. It was in the light
of such considerations that he confronted his former question anew. The
problem now was not who he was in the present but who he’d been in the
past, and the solution he sought was no longer supposed to help him live but
to help him figure out what sort of person to die as.
Someday Sota would live in a world from which Kido had vanished.
Would Kido even exist when Sota was thirty-eight, Kido’s age now? That
would be in thirty-three years. Kido would be seventy-one. Assuming he
was around. He hoped to be around. If he wasn’t, he wondered how Sota
would remember his father as he was in the present. What sort of person
might Kido carry on as in his son’s recollection? Old age was not the only
thing that could take him. In the next instant, the Nankai Trough earthquake
could strike, sending the bullet train off its track. Then Kido would die in
utter stupefaction. They had all heard ad nauseum since the quake how
great the risk was.
It was in the midst of his reignited existential anxiety that two new worries
made their presence felt: the return to cultural memory of the massacre of
Koreans and the ultraright xenophobic displays of the previous year.
The judicial order that Kido worked hard as a lawyer to preserve
propped up his quotidian life. It protected his and his family’s human rights
and maintained their status as sovereign citizens. But what if an apocalyptic
anomaly were to temporarily override this order in some limited area of
time and space? To the rabble-rousers who took to the streets in broad
daylight screaming, “Death to Koreans!” Kido’s subtle, intricate
questioning, his contemplations about his own life, would be meaningless.
Forget the need for such an anomaly. All it might take to stir someone up in
the midst of the everyday was the voice of fake news. Overflowing with
lies, they would then be capable of murdering members of the “Korean
race” as soon as they felt the urge.
This was the first time that Kido had fully articulated this to himself,
and a weakness suddenly washed over him. The overhead lights on the train
turned clamorously bright, taking on a blackish-red haze, and a nauseating
force seemed to press in from all sides. He lowered his head and closed his
eyes, took off his glasses, rubbed his face so hard it hurt, scraped one foot
against the other as he planted it hard into the floor. The woman in the
neighboring seat had been fiddling with her cell phone before, but now,
when Kido opened his eyes for a moment, she was leaning away and
observing him with discrete glances. Lacking even the peace of mind to
smile reassuringly, Kido could do nothing but hold his face in his hands and
rub his eyes, palms squeezed together, as he rode the feeling out.
I’m having a fit, he thought, disturbed by the way his body was
reacting. As dizziness crept up on him, Kido wrenched his already loose
necktie even looser and reclined his seat. Only when he started to take deep,
slow breaths did the discomfort finally begin to subside. You’re a good
person, Kido-sensei, I mean it. Wasn’t that what Rié had said? Kido mulled
over her words as though they might have the power to heal him. Would
Rié testify to that if he was accused of being a spy, or if he was given a
shibboleth like “Pronounce ‘fifteen yen and fifty sen!’” to test whether he
ought to be killed, as some had done during the massacre of Koreans?
Would her statement on his behalf have any meaning for his would-be
murderers? Or would their animosity, instead, extend to her . . . ?
Still unable to relax the furrow of distress in his brow, Kido thought
about his relationship with his wife since the Great East Japan Earthquake.
Although the ensuing tsunami had not harmed anyone that Kido knew
personally, he was nonetheless profoundly disturbed by the unimaginable
news footage of whole cities being washed away and could not bear to sit
idly by. So, in coordination with Nakakita and his other partners at the firm,
he had volunteered for an initiative providing legal support to those affected
by the disaster.
The problem he grappled with was that of the so-called “voluntary
evacuees” who had fled areas with elevated radiation levels due to the
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant meltdown, even though the
government had not designated them as mandatory evacuation zones. In
particular, Kido offered consultation to those who sought to switch the
“denominated temporary housing” they’d been allotted free of charge as per
the Disaster Relief Act. Many subsidized apartments chosen for this
purpose during the postdisaster pandemonium were dilapidated, the local
residents were noisy, or there were incidents of harassment directed at
evacuees. But those who moved without meeting such strict conditions as
“presence of remarkable danger” or “at landlord’s behest” would lose their
coverage. It was because of such bureaucratic defects in the system that the
assistance of lawyers like Kido was required.
Voluntary evacuees often ended up isolated, and Kido dealt with some
of the more extreme cases. Many were mothers who had left their husbands
behind due to disagreements over the true impact of radiation and whether
or not it necessitated abandoning their jobs, and who consequently settled
into the austere disaster relief lifestyle alone with their children. All of them
kept alive hope of reuniting as a family, with either the husband joining
them in the shelter or the wife returning home with the kids, but Kido was
involved in a number of tragic cases where the end result was divorce.

Kaori could not understand these efforts of Kido’s, and he was reminded of
the clean lines along which her kindness divided: family and friends on one
side, everyone else on the other. A good and caring mother, she
remembered the names of Sota’s playmates from day care far better than
Kido ever could and had made friends with several of their mothers, with
whom she sometimes went for tea and other outings. And yet she took it as
self-evident that she would be indifferent to the lot of children starving
under some unfamiliar sky.
Kido donated regularly to Doctors Without Borders and UNICEF, and
Kaori used to observe such societal generosity with bemusement, writing it
off as one of his professional quirks. But recently, they had both begun to
sense something troubling in this difference of outlook and avoided
bringing it up in conversation.
Kido wasn’t such a bleeding heart as to get upset about each and every
one of the numerous deaths happening all over the world at any given
instant. His own death terrified him. The death of an acquaintance was sad.
The death of someone he hated might be welcome news. When it came to
the death of complete strangers, the truth was that Kido felt nothing. And
yet by imagining them as himself, as people that he knew, he felt terrified,
sad.
Some people might conceivably read a news report about a random
parent and child dying in a car accident and mourn them as they would their
own family, but it would be weird if this entailed, conversely, that they
could only grieve the death of their family to the same degree as that of
strangers. Kido had a normal disparity in his empathy and knew that it was
only thanks to this fact that he was capable of being a lawyer.
He and his wife should have had no trouble sharing in their guilt and
detachment within this range. It wasn’t as though Kaori was exceptionally
heartless. Take the Great East Japan Earthquake. By the time Kido
suggested she donate, she had already given generously to the Red Cross.
What Kaori just couldn’t wrap her head around was Kido’s motive for
giving his blood, sweat, and tears for strangers when all the while his
feelings did not sincerely go out to them. Was it concern about keeping up
face professionally? Was it naive shame at being unmoved by their
suffering? She insisted that, if either of them had changed, it was Kido, not
her, and when Kido thought about what he’d been like when they met, he
had to concede the point.
 If there had been two or three Kidos with a never-ending supply of
time and money, while Kaori might have upbraided him for his shallow
compassion, she would have probably left him to do as he wished. But in
reality, volunteering required Kido to apportion the time and money he had
for their son, not merely for himself. When the earthquake struck, Sota was
still two and a half. Aftershocks came one after the next and it was anyone’s
guess when the next big tremor might hit. Kaori didn’t see anything
commendable in Kido’s leaving behind his wife and child to go off and take
care of other wives and children at a time like that, evacuees or not, and
none of her friends spoke up in Kido’s defense either.
In all of this, Kido respected his wife for what he perceived as her
straightforwardness, honesty, and intelligence. Whenever he tried to explain
himself using phrases like “social presence” and “public good,” she
accepted everything, understanding his activities in the name of these ideas
as roundabout ways of benefitting them. But at the same time, Kaori sensed
a kind of empty indulgence in his attitude toward charity and treated his
good works as nothing more than a sort of hobby.
Once she had begun to see his humanitarian tendencies this way, they
became all the more difficult for her to tolerate, as Kaori no longer had any
hobbies of her own. With each passing year, she found less and less that
called to her in the world and had already lost nearly all interest in anything
besides family. When Kido grew concerned about this and urged her to go
out and have a good time while he looked after their son, she just ended up
discussing the finer details of child rearing over a meal with one of her
university classmates. Somewhere along the way, her single friends, who
could not join her in such talk, had all drifted away.
Her single-minded focus on family had begun after she gave birth and
become more pronounced since the earthquake. Now she demanded to
know why it was so important to Kido that she do other things. On the
contrary, why wasn’t going back and forth between work and home enough
to fulfill him?

Hearing the announcement that the train had passed Odawara on schedule,
Kido opened his eyes and sat up. He must have drifted off at some point, as
the woman in the neighboring seat was gone. With eyes unfocused, he
crossed his legs and recalled again what Rié had said. You’re a good person,
Kido-sensei, I mean it. Had he gone out of his way to be kind to her in order
to fish for such compliments? Perhaps as proof that he was a good,
harmless, in-no-way-suspicious Normal Japanese Person?
What a silly idea, Kido thought with a shake of his head and, rubbing
his eyes vigorously again, told himself that the answer on both accounts had
to be no. He was blowing his insecurity about being Zainichi way out of
proportion. Yes, the postearthquake spike in nationalism had unsettled him,
but that wasn’t only because of his ethnicity. His colleagues at the firm were
just as upset. It would have been one thing if the problem had been limited
to the far right, but even putatively serious publishers were complicit. Kido
and the other lawyers had watched, crestfallen, as imprints they’d revered
suddenly began to fill the bookstores with titles like Hating China and
Hating Korea. Under such circumstances, it would have been crazy not to
become pessimistic.
. . . I admit that my concern for society is in some sense hollow and
reminiscent of some goody-two-shoes A-student trying to show off to his
teacher, just as you impugn it to be. But part of it also derives from innate
compassion that your point fails to take account of. Trying to work out the
degree to which my actions arise from sincerity and the degree to which
they are merely a pretense to virtue would be a fruitless exercise.
Kido was indeed experiencing a kind of existential anxiety, but
Japan’s dark prospects were no doubt a far bigger factor than his own
identity. Might it not be merely the banal, petit bourgeois anxiety of an age
in which even lawyers struggled to put food on the table?
Kido decided that perhaps he should talk with Kaori after all. She too
had to be feeling discombobulated by the earthquake. And wishing to
restore the situation at home to the way it had once been, he finally took
hold of the one thought that had seemed too troublesome to attend to. The
situation might be much simpler and more clear-cut than he was making it
out to be. In a word, maybe his wife didn’t love him anymore.
If so, was there anything he could do about it? Their relationship was
already in the process of gradually falling apart. And he had good reason to
think so. For their dynamic was almost indistinguishable from that of the
couples he advised almost daily and whose negotiations ended in divorce.
 CHAPTER NINE

When October rolled around, Kido received an unexpected message from

Misuzu. She was planning to visit the Yokohama Museum of Art in Minato
Mirai for an exhibit called “New Visions in the Twenty-First Century” and
was wondering if he had time to join her. As she also mentioned that she
wanted to consult with him about the search for Daisuké Taniguchi, Kido
rejiggered his schedule and arranged for them to have lunch as well.
Since Kido had been following her Instagram-linked Facebook feed,
he had a general sense of her recent activities. While she wasn’t the most
prolific poster, she had a knack for capturing unassuming everyday scenes,
whether it was a display window mannequin in fall and winter apparel or a
cake she’d enjoyed, and her captions were breezy and concise, in keeping
with her personality. She seemed to go out regularly on her own to the
movies or to art museums, and rarely posted selfies, appearing mostly when
tagged now and then in photos taken by her friends. In all such shots, she
remained colored for Kido by his impression of her as a “mean mixer of
gimlets,” even when she appeared in the light of day.
In the comment section, Kido observed the playful back-and-forth
between her friends and work associates. Among them were a few male
admirers who found opportunities to compliment her on her looks. The
manager of Sunny often popped up, and there were several pictures of
Misuzu and him smiling together, surrounded by drunken people.
The main reason Kido had made a Facebook account in the first place
was to contact Misuzu, and he still wasn’t exactly an avid user. For the most
part, he shared other people’s posts and uploaded the occasional batch of
photos, including a few from his trip to Miyazaki. As he hadn’t told his
friends about his account, his newsfeed was fairly deserted, but Misuzu
liked almost anything he put up. At first, Kido took this for a standard
courtesy of the social network, until he realized that not all his “friends” did
this nor did it appear that Misuzu did the same for just anyone. He liked her
posts in return, unsure what this signalled, and felt slight thrills at these
fleeting interactions.

And yet, over the past two months or so, their exchanges over Facebook
had been complicated by the fact that Misuzu had created an account under
Daisuké Taniguchi’s name and started posting as though she were him in
the hopes of tracking him down. The idea was that he would be sure to send
a message once the impersonation came to his attention. Kido most
definitely did not approve of this ploy, but he didn’t entirely blame Misuzu,
as it had apparently been Kyoichi who cooked it up.
Now that it had become clear that the police had dropped the search
for his brother, Kyoichi displayed outrage at any opportunity. In part, this
was his way of venting about the detective in charge, who he held a grudge
against for being snooty. But more than anything, it was a sign of his relief
that there was no imminent possibility of the search turning into a big
enough deal to attract attention. While a person going missing might be of
profound importance to the family, it was an everyday occurrence to the
police. Kyoichi’s realization of this put his mind at ease. And once Kido
told him that the census records had been updated to indicate that his
brother was once again alive and unmarried, he began to think of Daisuké’s
disappearance as a problem for the family to deal with internally.
Kyoichi continued to insist that his brother must have been murdered.
What appalled Kido was his suggestion that Daisuké had been
“piggybacked” by North Korean agents, a word he had apparently found
online. When Kido expressed doubts about the theory, Kyoichi didn’t cling
to it, but maintained instead that, whatever the specifics, if his brother had
been murdered, it must have been precipitated by some nefarious turn of
events rather than simple mischief. Something fitting for the sort of person
his brother had been—Kyoichi seemed harrowed by the very thought of it.
“We didn’t hear anything from him after the earthquake. That’s
screwy, right? If he was alive, he’d at least give us a ring. Unless his life is
so awful he can’t even show his face.”
Although Kyoichi had shown almost no initiative in searching for his
brother, wary of stumbling upon some lurking trouble, his—their—mother,
to Kido’s surprise, had apparently bawled him out for this. Tearful, she’d
urged him to kick up his search efforts, saying that she desperately wanted
to see her younger son once more before she died.
By this time, Kido had checked the attachment to Daisuké Taniguchi’s
family register and found his address prior to moving to Town S. It was for
a dirt-cheap, blighted apartment on the Yodo River in Osaka City’s Kita
district. The building management had an office nearby, and once Kido had
explained all this to Rié and Kyoichi, he proposed that the three of them go
there together. But before Rié could reply, Kyoichi, claiming to have
business in Osaka, stopped by the office himself and met with the president
of the company.
According to Kyoichi, the president sympathized with his story about
his missing brother and, after studying Daisuké’s picture, had said that he
felt fairly certain he was the one who had lived there. Just to be sure,
Kyoichi showed him a picture of X, but the man shook his head and said
that the face didn’t ring any bells.
This meant that Daisuké had remained Daisuké up until his time in
that Osaka apartment. He’d then had a run-in with X and had everything,
from his name to his family register, taken from him. Kyoichi had learned
this through the simplest detective work in the world, and he was enraged
anew with the police for not even bothering.
Toward the end of the meeting, Kyoichi asked for Daisuké’s phone
number and forwarding address, assuming they were taken down when he
vacated. Immediately, the heretofore cooperative president’s expression
turned wary, as though he had suddenly wised up to something. He then
concluded evasively by saying that he wasn’t sure they still had those files
but would be sure to take a look.
Kyoichi figured the man was worried about getting mixed up in
trouble, which he thought was understandable under the circumstances. He
had not heard from him since.
Kido could think of reasons why Kyoichi might have gone to Osaka
without them. What he couldn’t understand at first was why he’d put
Misuzu up to making a Facebook account for his brother. That Misuzu went
on posting as Daisuké was simply bizarre and seemed unlikely to achieve
anything. But in the process of observing the online exchanges between
Kyoichi, Misuzu, and Misuzu masquerading as Daisuké Taniguchi, Kido
gradually puzzled out what Kyoichi was really after. And this only
reinforced his conviction that their ploy was not something he could get on
board with.
Daisuké Taniguchi’s account displayed a number of old photos
uploaded by Misuzu and Kyoichi, listed his hometown and schools, and
liked the pages for Michael Schenker along with two of his former bands,
Scorpions and UFO. According to Misuzu, Daisuké had been an especially
big UFO fan, so they considered trying to find him through their official
page on the off chance that he might be connected, but decided it would be
too difficult to sift him out from the two hundred and fifty thousand other
followers.
There were several people named Daisuké Taniguchi on the various
social media networks—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter—but none appeared
to be the one they were looking for. While it was unclear what dealings
Daisuké might have had with X, Kido thought it unlikely, assuming he was
alive, that he would register using his real name. It was even possible that
he had switched names with X.
Kido didn’t doubt that Daisuké Taniguchi would be gobsmacked if he
saw the imposter account, but wondered if he would just think X was
behind it. He wasn’t sure if X, in his guise as Daisuké Taniguchi, was
supposed to have been aware of the existence of Misuzu. Either way, if
Daisuké Taniguchi saw a fake version of himself exchanging intimate
comments with his former lover, he would surely be disturbed. But would
he take the bait and contact her?
Whatever the answer, Kido could tell from observing the conversation
unfolding over the Daisuké account that Kyoichi was attracted to Misuzu.
And these feelings had not developed only recently. Rather, there appeared
to be history there. Kido’s suspicion was that Kyoichi had loved Misuzu,
but she had chosen his younger brother. There were also signs that Kyoichi
and Misuzu were messaging privately, though Kido never asked them about
it directly.
The Daisuké Taniguchi played by Misuzu was vigorous and cheerful,
had a competitive streak despite being timid, and displayed his sensitive
side when posting about how UFO’s “Love to Love” made him cry. He was,
in other words, the Daisuké Taniguchi that she wished him to be, the only
Daisuké Taniguchi that she could in fact imagine. Playing with her
recollection of him, Misuzu was wistfully reliving her past. Embodying
those memories, she could feel her love for him just beyond the tips of her
fingers.
Kido’s perception of Misuzu had changed since the night he’d
pretended to be Daisuké Taniguchi in that bar. For once thoroughly
intoxicated, Kido was relating everything he knew about the man, when he
found himself saying that he had once been in love with her. Now he had a
secret wish that he was terrified someone might uncover: namely, he
wanted to experience what it was like to be the young man who had loved
her and been loved by her, even just for a few hours. So when he thought
about meeting her in person, he felt ashamed and flustered, comporting
himself exactly like someone trying to hide a crush.
This shift inside Kido only distorted and complicated his feelings
about his wife’s suspicions. Since her doubts about his fidelity had begun
after his trip to Miyazaki, he’d assumed she was having presentiments of
him cheating with Rié and had had little patience for it, when in reality she
may have been anticipating Misuzu all along. Of course, Kido considered
this possibility no less ludicrous.

At eleven o’clock on the appointed date, Kido met with Misuzu at

Minatomirai Station. She was dressed casually in a loose, slightly-off-the-
shoulder blouse and ankle-length jeans that suited her well-proportioned
figure. Walking beside her in his necktie, Kido couldn’t help feeling like a
cornball.
“Sorry to drag you out when you’re so busy,” said Misuzu with the
same laid-back smile he remembered.
 At the bar, Kido had been seated on a stool, looking slightly up at her.
Now that they were standing face-to-face, he was struck by her big eyes
with their thick lower lids and the sleek definition of her nose. Her perfume
was conservative, appropriate for the morning.
As it was a weekday before noon, and the exhibit featured the work of
only young up-and-comers, the museum was all but empty. They climbed
up and down stairwells like miniatures of those in the Musée d’Orsay,
hardly speaking as they wandered around and took in the different displays.
Although Kido was no art expert, since he preferred the cultivated
simplicity of work like Fontana’s Spatial Concept, much of what he saw
there did nothing for him. The boats made of cardboard. The violent,
anime-themed sketches. The portrait of an elementary school student done
in countless impressions of three kinds of stamp: “Nice effort!” “Well
done!” and “Excellent work!” Now and then he looked to Misuzu,
searching for indications of whether these were to her taste; nothing made
her stop for long either.
But on the second floor, they soon discovered a work entitled Three
Years Old, A Memory that was for both of them an exceptional treat. The
artist was a Japanese woman in her late twenties based in Berlin. Kido had
never heard of her. She had built a large installation resembling the box sets
used in theater. Stepping inside, they found a faithful reproduction of the
living room of the artist when she was a child, except that the scale of all
the furniture and household items was gigantic.
It was supposed to be the artist’s very first memory. Her intention was
to allow a vicarious bodily experience of the world exactly as she had seen
it when she was three years old. The square wood dinner table rose to about
Kido’s eye level, and the four chairs set around it were too tall to sit on
without climbing. Everything from the saltshaker to the grains of sugar on
the pancakes was huge, the knives with blades like short swords, everything
looming beyond reach. The overall effect was to make the bodies of the
spectators small by comparison.
Kido had come up with similar concepts from observing Sota’s daily
wandering around the living room and kitchen, and sometimes indulged in
tender reminiscence over his own early childhood. In the beginning he’d
been too small to see the mirror in the bathroom but gradually grew until he
could spot the reflection of his hair if he jumped, then his face. Eventually
he could brush his teeth unaided before finally being able to see himself up
to the waist. What sort of thoughts might have been running through his
head at the age when objects at home had been as overwhelming as they
were in this installation? Its one flaw was the somewhat shoddy sculpture of
a mother standing in the kitchen.
Kido and Misuzu both clambered with some difficulty onto the chairs
and faced each other across the table. Unlike when the bar counter had been
between them, they were both smiling bashfully. It was as though they’d
reverted to the bodies of children and travelled back in time. Having
become make-believe childhood friends, they began to hanker for afternoon
desserts that they might share, and as they continued to sit there, both
sensed that someone bigger might just serve them.
For lunch, they went to a well-known restaurant attached to the station
that served Mont-Saint-Michel cuisine. Over souffléed omelets so fluffy the
eggs had been whipped into a froth, they shared their impressions of the
exhibition and both grinned wryly to admit that it had been mediocre at best
overall. When Misuzu apologized for inviting Kido, he shook his head and
reassured her that he had enjoyed Three Years Old, A Memory, at least.
“It really was great, wasn’t it?” she said. “I could practically spend all
day just zoning out in there—but that mother in the kitchen! She looked so
lonely facing away from us . . . What do you think the artist was trying to
express with that?”
“Oh . . . interesting. Given the bad workmanship, I just assumed that
the artist lacked the knack for people, but perhaps you’re right. There must
be a reason she’s so poorly realized . . .”
Kido was impressed with Misuzu’s insight and eye for detail.
“The artist’s note made it sound like she had some issues with her
parents,” said Misuzu.
“I missed that . . . Come to think of it, while it might be an opportunity
to reflect fondly on the past for someone whose early days had been happy,
for some people it would be painful—being in that space, I mean.”
Misuzu smiled in agreement, and her eyes seemed to ask which
category Kido fell into. At the same time, something in her expression told
him that she wouldn’t judge if he chose not to answer.
“I think that I probably come from a happy home. I was close with
both my parents and my younger brother.”
 “I had a feeling.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. I had a pretty normal family too. I mean in a good way.”
“Yes, we were normal too in a way, but you see, I’m third-generation
Zainichi, though I have Japanese citizenship now because I naturalized in
high school. So the inside of our home looked a tad bit different from a
typical Japanese home in those days. For example, there was Korean
calligraphy and commemorative pictures of my grandmother and mother
wearing jeogori. Only little things, really . . . That piece we just saw, I
imagine when it’s shown overseas, the visitors appreciate it because they
can translate it to their own memories of being a toddler in whatever
country, but inside Japan, I could see it taking flack for the way it portrays
the so-called ‘normal home.’ We have more and more people here with
roots in different countries, and the gap between rich and poor is widening
—or perhaps I should say it’s a work that provokes thought precisely about
such issues . . .”
The first time Kido met Misuzu, he had been extremely guarded about
his ethnic background, but here he was, putting it out in the open with
unhesitating ease. He hadn’t even realized he was doing so until after the
fact, while still in the middle of speaking. This change in him was probably
due to the effect of the art he had just encountered and of becoming familiar
with Misuzu’s sentiments and way of thinking over the past few months.
Although her face showed no signs of surprise, her eyes suggested that she
was reviewing her past behavior toward him in her mind.
“Wow, I never thought of any of that. Almost makes me want to take
another look.”
“Your observation about the mother made me feel the same way.”
“So we’ll head back to the gallery when we’re done?” said Misuzu
with a joking smile. Then, looking worried, she added, “That conversation
at Sunny must have been uncomfortable for you.”
“Not at all,” said Kido with a shrug. “Abduction is a real problem,
after all—though I suppose your boss did belabor his point.”
“Not just that . . .” Misuzu seemed reluctant to go on. “Takagi is
prejudiced toward Chinese and Koreans. I guess you could say it runs deep
in him.”
 “Even though he’s such a big fan of black music! Hasn’t it made him
sensitive to discrimination at all?”
“He doesn’t see the connection. I don’t think he even realizes he’s
discriminating.”
Kido let the unpleasant topic fizzle out with a few polite nods before
asking, “Is he your . . .”
Before he’d finished his question, Misuzu cut him short with a pout of
dismay. “People jump to that conclusion all the time, but it’s nothing like
that.”
Not wanting to be insensitive, Kido stopped himself from asking if
Takagi had unrequited feelings for her. In the awkward silence that ensued,
Misuzu reopened their former topic, seeming to feel the need to clarify her
position.
“The recent hate speech is the worst. It’s just gross.”
Her tone of open detestation was so unlike the shallow words of pity
Kido was used to. Most people spoke as though it was his problem, not
theirs. And he felt the last of the tension he’d been holding on to fall away.
“To be honest, I don’t feel hurt or angry when it becomes that extreme,
when they’re shouting, ‘Die!’ and ‘Cockroach!’ . . . though I do find it
tiresome.” Kido smiled weakly, like a bottle of flat carbonated water being
popped.
“How did things get like this? I feel like saying those awful things
would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.”
“I suppose the dregs of internet language have been stirred up.”
“Is there no way to crack down on it legally?”
“There are some movements to do just that, yes, but opinion is split in
judicial circles over how to balance it with freedom of expression.
Personally I think that hate speech should be restricted once the definition is
clarified . . . But—how can I put it?—I’d prefer not to dedicate myself to
this problem. Yes, I despise the scum who say such racist things, and my
stress levels would be lower if they were gone . . . but only a little. There
are plenty of more important things in my life that I should be thinking
about. Like the cases I’m working on, and my family, and especially my
son . . . not to mention . . .”
Kido stared at Misuzu. He’d almost gotten carried away and told her
that the time they were spending together right then was a perfect example
of something profoundly important, but held his tongue for fear it would
sound like he was hitting on her. Instead, he cut into the hearty, well-fluffed
omelet on his plate. Cooked to the ideal golden hue, it was folded in half,
and frothy egg overflowed from the seam with such impudence that Kido
almost felt thwarted. It made him think of molten lava rushing toward the
sea.
“. . . Well, various things,” he continued. “Just tons of things that are
worthier of the fuss and pain of serious consideration. Happy and pleasant
things too, of course . . . I grew up like any Japanese person, in a regular
town, not in a Korean enclave, so I never experienced bullying. Until
recently, I was hardly even aware of the stigma attached to my
background.”
“It must be tough living with a stigma.”
“Yes and no. Having a stigma means that you have some kind of trait
that serves as the basis for discrimination, negative feelings, or even
attacks. This irrespective of whether the trait is intrinsically bad or not. For
example, the circumstances of your birth and rearing, a birthmark on your
face, a criminal record. Everything else about you is ignored. All your
multifaceted complexity is reduced to that one aspect. So if you’re Zainichi,
that’s all you are and nothing more.”
“How unfair.”
“Yes, but the implications are not only negative. In all honesty, I don’t
like when other Zainichi try to claim me, as though we were somehow
separate and special. I feel the same way about being from Ishikawa. Our
prefecture has traditionally used the self-deprecating nickname ‘the
Beggar,’ and there may be something to it, but it makes me uncomfortable
when people refer to it at every available opportunity. Whether it’s being a
lawyer or being Japanese, the same applies. It’s unbearable to have your
identity summed up by one thing and one thing only and for other people to
have control over what that is.”
“That is so true!” said Misuzu excitedly, bending backward and then
leaning forward across the table on the rebound off her chair. “I’m always
saying exactly the same thing.”
“You’re putting it into practice, Misuzu, more so than I am. Working
freelance by day and mixing cocktails by night.”
“My philosophy is Three-Steps-Forward-Four-Steps-Backism.”
 “Pardon me?”
“Life isn’t all unicorns and rainbows, so I’m fine taking three steps
forward and four steps back.”
“You must mean four steps forward and three back. If you took three
forward and four back, you’d be losing more ground than you gained.”
Kido thought he’d caught her making a simple slip of the tongue, but
Misuzu shook her head.
“Nope. Three forward and four back is the way to go. You might not
think so by looking at me, but I’m a megapessimist—true pessimists are full
of cheer! That’s my personal motto. Our expectations are always low, so
when something just a little bit nice happens, we’re on cloud nine.”
Misuzu laughed proudly. But Kido was somewhat befuddled by her
pet theories. Until suddenly it was as though a new visual field were
opening up inside him and what she was saying clicked.
“Makes sense . . . ,” he said.
“I have terrible luck. Like Daisuké disappearing on me. Honestly, I’d
totally settle for two steps forward and four steps back. But I’m setting my
sights high with Three-Steps-Forward-Four-Steps-Backism.”
“That’s a good way to think.”
“Right?”
“The way the world is right now, it’s as though taking a single step
back cancels out the three steps you took forward.”
“So you’re a pessimist too.”
“Yes. I suppose I am.”
“Everyone makes this world out to be so much better than it actually
is. They just see it the way they want it to be. That’s why they blame people
for their misfortunes. Meanwhile, they’re not even satisfied with their own
lives.”
“That’s very true. Because you never know what might happen . . .
And, well, being Zainichi isn’t exactly a step back or anything, but it’s
difficult for me to say how much stress it actually brings—the whole topic
is just tiresome. The worst would be if some oddball were to write a novel
with me as the protagonist and call it Tale of a Third-Generation Zainichi.
Not that Tale of a Lawyer would be much better.”
“You’re a funny guy, Kido-san.”
“You think so?”
 “But I totally understand what you’re getting at.”
“I don’t think that I’m representative of most Zainichi anyway. So,
getting back to what we were talking about, I know I have to do something
to fight hate speech, but when I see those videos online, it’s just . . .”
“Considering joining one of the counter-demonstrations?”
“I’m not interested in those. If I’m going to do anything, I suppose I’ll
give legal advice to the victims or something of that nature. Though a
verdict has just been reached in the civil case over the attack on that Korean
primary school in Kyoto . . . I think I’ve always organized my life to avoid
places where I might interact with such people. As I go about my daily
business, I simply don’t have to worry about someone launching racist
remarks at me. Going to a demonstration and hearing their awful train of
vituperation would be off-putting to say the least.”
“Sure . . . but forget about people you don’t know. What about your
family? Your parents, your son.”
Kido saw Sota’s face in his mind’s eye and had to take a moment
before he could reply. He recalled Kaori saying that she wanted Kido to
hide his ancestry. Her point wasn’t that his being Zainichi made her feel
inferior but that they needed to protect their son from physical harm. Kido
had not raised any disagreement.
“Well, yes, fair point . . . But if you’re going to say that I should go
because I’m Zainichi, then shouldn’t Japanese people treat it as a problem
with their own country and be obligated to go to the counter-demonstrations
themselves? They’re the ones who are giving those scoundrels free rein.
Since they’re not part of the solution, then they must be part of the problem
—which I guess forces me to conclude that I should go too, since I’m a
Japanese citizen now.”
Kido gave Misuzu a playful smile to show he had no intention of
arguing. While he was speaking, the sensations he’d experienced on the
bullet train the other day had begun to creep up, and he wanted to change
the subject.
“Anyway, I suppose deciding who the victims are and who perpetuates
their suffering is no easy matter . . . Wherever that line happens to fall, I
think a third party should intervene. It is the need for such intervention,
after all, that is the basis for the whole legal profession.”
 Misuzu nodded as though she was convinced, staring at him with kind,
narrowed eyes. Though he was surprised by her slight smile, it somehow
made him relieved.
“Then I’m going to go in your place, Kido-san,” she said.
“Huh?” Caught off guard, Kido didn’t know whether to be impressed
or bewildered. “That’s not what I was trying to suggest . . . I don’t think
that’s a good idea. It would just make you feel awful. But thank you.”
“No need to worry. I want to go for my own reasons,” said Misuzu
with a laugh.
Siphoning a bit of her mirth, Kido laughed too. Then he thought again
what a mysterious woman she was.
He never learned what aspect of the search for Daisuké Taniguchi she
had wanted to consult with him about. But one thing soon became clear:
their online interactions from that day forward would reach a new level of
intimacy.
 CHAPTER TEN

Already more than ten months had passed since Kido had taken on Rié’s
case, and yet he had made no progress with his investigation into the
identity of X. The case had remained on his mind even as other work, such
as the death-by-overwork lawsuit, kept him extremely busy. But once Rié’s
family register had been successfully revised and all pressing issues dealt
with, he was at a loss for how to proceed. Meanwhile, he wasn’t expecting
the fake account managed by Misuzu and Kyoichi to yield any
breakthroughs.
It was while he was at this standstill that he came across a potential
lead thanks to a conversation he had with Nakakita at the firm. For in the
process of continuing to provide support to those affected by the earthquake
in the Tohoku region, Nakakita had been approached by someone seeking
advice about victims of the ensuing tsunami whose existence the
government had not kept track of because they lacked a family register.
While some people had ended up without a family register after World
War II—when they neglected to report that theirs had been lost after records
stored in government offices were destroyed due to American firebombing
—improved archiving procedures prevented similar problems from
occurring in the recent earthquake. Although the original registers were still
stored in local offices, copies were now kept in the applicable Regional
Affairs Bureau. Digitization was also in progress. But in spite of such
measures, some children still lacked family registers due to the so-called
“three-hundred-day problem,” and it was about just such a case that
Nakakita had been consulted.
As per the Civil Code, a child born within three hundred days of a
divorce was legally considered to be the child of the former husband. The
law had become controversial of late because women, who, for example,
divorced after suffering domestic violence and who had a child soon after
with a new partner, sometimes refrained from submitting a notification of
birth. This left some children to enter society without a family register.
Even though they met all the conditions to obtain Japanese citizenship, the
state was not aware that they were alive and consequently could not tally
their deaths when they were swallowed up by the tsunami. As far as official
records were concerned, the events of both their coming into the world and
leaving it had simply not taken place—there was never even anything that
temporarily existed for the word “not” to deny, with no unfolding from the
beginning, and the circle of nothingness closed.
As Kido was listening to Nakakita’s explanation, he began to wonder
if X might have been one of these unregistered people, which was precisely
what his colleague had been implying all along. Assuming Daisuké
Taniguchi was safe and sound, Kido had been imagining him living under
X’s identity, having swapped family registers with him. But what if X had
been unregistered? Did that mean Daisuké had become unregistered in his
place? Kyoichi suspected murder. But if Daisuké Taniguchi had taken on
the identity of someone entirely absent from public records, the state would
be unable to recognize his murder. Even if his body were discovered, it
would be disposed of as unidentified. His surviving acquaintances and
friends might testify, his DNA might be tested, his photos and personal
effects might remain, and on this basis, the fact that he seemed to have
existed might be inferred. But supposing he had been taken by the tsunami,
all physical evidence might have been completely washed away and the
search mired in even more remarkable difficulties.
Kido had been hopeful that Daisuké Taniguchi was still around. Now,
even setting aside all speculation about the tsunami, he began to feel a sense
of foreboding. For Rié’s sake as much as Daisuké Taniguchi’s, he didn’t
want to believe that X had killed him. She seemed to be holding on by a
thread and, if it turned out that X was a murderer, he was worried that she
might lose her tenuous grip.
Nakakita related this story about vanished tsunami victims while he and
Kido sat on the office couch drinking coffee. When he was done, they
talked for a while about the history of the family register.
Its introduction dated back to the era of the Ritsuryo system, an
imperial bureaucracy modelled after China’s that began in the late sixth
century. Used mainly in the beginning for policing and tax collection, the
family register was expanded over a millennium later in the Edo period
when it became a tool for cracking down on Christianity. Records of
religious affiliation were drawn up to check who was registered with
Buddhist temples, and a wider range of information was incorporated for
individual identity management, including birth, marriage, adoption, current
address, job, and death. From then on, there were always numerous people,
such as vagrants, who were not accounted for in the records.
As this system presupposed attachment to land, it was rendered
obsolete in the late nineteenth century, not long after the start of the Meiji
period, when freedom of movement was recognized, and the first modern
family register was introduced. This new family register was employed in
the census for the purposes of conscription and tax collection, and the desire
to avoid these led many to ditch or falsify their registers.
“Some kids ended up without family registers when they were born
out of wedlock and went unreported,” said Nakakita as he ate a slice of the
Baumkuchen that someone had brought to share. “Others when they were
born overseas in wartime and the closure of a diplomatic mission prevented
their parents from submitting a birth notification. You might say the system
was like Swiss cheese.”
“I understand why someone might think that being unregistered would
be advantageous before the end of World War II,” Kido replied. “The social
security system was sorely lacking in those days, and you’d be able to
dodge the draft. I suppose that’s why the government was so draconian in
its promotion of the Imperial Rescript on Education.”
“But it was a reinforcing circle,” said Nakakita. “Because the basis for
imperial citizenship was that all full citizens were connected through the
institution of the family to the eternal, unbroken line of the emperor.”
“Your point being that people were excluded from the spiritual body
of the nation and became second-class citizens if they weren’t included in
the family register.”
 “Just look at the Korean Peninsula. That’s exactly how Japan’s
assimilation policies worked there.” Nakakita’s tone suggested that these
policies were naturally deserving of criticism, in respectful
acknowledgment of Kido’s heritage. When Kido merely nodded in
agreement, Nakakita went on.
“In any case, the government mostly conducts identity management
with residence certificates these days. Once they tie together taxes and
social security with the My Number system, the family register will finally
become redundant.”
“True. Though that may only make it easier to trade identities.”
“Until they’re managed together with biometrics. Then the system will
be pretty much inescapable.”
“Good point. Anyhow, it’s because of the family register system that
someone like Daisuké Taniguchi would want to make a clean break from
his family.”
“And what about X? If he wasn’t unregistered to begin with, then I’d
wager he was hiding a criminal record. And for a very serious crime.
Nothing worse than having society and the state eyeing you suspiciously all
the time.”
“Hmm . . . I see what you mean.”
“Daisuké Taniguchi’s record is clean?”
“Sparkling.”
“Well, then . . .”
With arms crossed, Kido began to consider this. Nakakita shrugged,
not bothering to belabor his point.

After his conversation with Nakakita, Kido tried researching criminal cases
related to social security, and soon hit upon a peculiar ruling from six years
earlier.
It involved a then fifty-five-year-old man in Tokyo’s Adachi ward.
Pretending to be another man aged sixty-seven, he’d illegitimately received
his pension. But he hadn’t merely gone fraudulently by this other man’s
name. He had traded family registers with him upon their mutual
agreement. The other man had made the swap in order to convince his
fiancée, a woman in her thirties, that he had never been married before and
that he was a decade younger. In court, the verdict was that the fifty-five-
year-old man was guilty of false entry in an original notarized electronic
document and of sharing this false document. He was sentenced to one year
in prison with a three-year suspension of sentence.
What caught Kido’s attention was that the case involved a third person
who served as the broker for the exchange. Although this middleman was
given only a suspended sentence as an accomplice, he was later arrested,
this time for an investment scam involving fundraising for a nonexistent
business, and sentenced to three years in prison. It seemed that he had
arranged numerous other register exchanges, charging a handling fee each
time.
The case dated to 2007, the exact year that Daisuké Taniguchi moved
out of his apartment in Osaka and X appeared in Town S, and as Kido was
reading the record, he began to wonder if they might not have met through
this man. Further research revealed that he was currently serving his
sentence at Yokohama Prison. As it was only thirty minutes by train from
his condo, Kido decided to arrange a visit.

Kido told the man by letter that he wanted to ask him about an incident
from six years ago, and the man wrote back to say that it would be “his
pleasure,” an odd response given that Kido was nothing to him but some
lawyer he had never met.
The sky was overcast and the air was chilly on the morning Kido went
to Yokohama Prison. The man had said that he preferred to meet early in the
day, so Kido arrived at ten o’clock and told the guard at the entrance that he
was there to see one of the inmates.
It was his first visit to Yokohama Prison in ten years, as he had only
overseen civil cases of late. If not for the surrounding wall, the building
might have been mistaken for a school, and Kido was reminded of Michel
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, which he had
read in university. Incarcerated there were two types of convict: those in the
B class, with “advanced criminal tendencies including repeat offenders” and
those in the F class, defined as “foreigners requiring different treatment
from Japanese.” At the reception, Kido filled out a visit request form and
checked in his bag. The man had the unusual family name of Omiura.
Presently, Omiura appeared in the visiting room escorted by a
corrections officer. He was a bald, chubby man said to be fifty-nine years
old. His right eye was bigger than his left, and the deep lines of his forehead
were accentuated by short, sparse eyebrows. The moment he saw Kido,
Omiura smiled delightedly with a mouth like a carp’s.
“To what do I owe the honor of a visit from such a handsome lawyer?”
Omiura exclaimed as he took a seat on the other side of the clear acrylic
partition, looking Kido over with his head tilted obliquely as though sizing
him up. “You see, I’ve got an inferiority complex about my looks. It’s on
account of overcompensating that I ended up here.”
Omiura spoke with a faint slur and, although he was affable enough,
had a strained air about him that seemed to quietly threaten murder if you
belittled him. The bit about Kido being handsome reeked of insincerity, and
yet the admission of his lack of confidence—intended to better convey the
initial flattery—came off as genuine. To Kido, his pinched left eye and
wide-open right seemed in a peculiar way to symbolize this contrary
impulse in his words, as they strove to instill belief in one thing while
simultaneously concealing another.
Not taking up Omiura’s strange greeting, Kido was about to launch
into the topic he had come to discuss when Omiura said, “You must be
Zainichi, eh, sensei?”
Kido scowled, but could not immediately find the words to reply, as
though his throat were being strangled. When he let out a soft sigh, he
realized that his breathing had in fact stopped for several seconds. The
corrections officer remained in his seat beside Omiura, showing no signs of
interest.
“So?” said the convict.
“Am I supposed to respond to that?” said Kido.
“Your face says it all. Especially the shape of your nose and eyes. I
can see through you in a second.”
Across Kido’s mind’s eye flitted his own face in the mirror each
morning.
“I’m third generation,” he said. “But I’m a naturalized Japanese
citizen.”
 Kido pushed down his anger, not wanting to waste any of the
visitation time. As though this exchange had allowed Omiura to balance out
his feeling of inferiority with a kind of superiority, he smiled, his lip peeling
back to reveal only his upper teeth.
Kido gave a simple self-introduction and explained the reason for his
visit. Omiura distractedly nodded along to what he was saying before soon
interrupting.
“Sensei, there really are people out there who live to be three hundred
years old, aren’t there?”
“. . . Huh?”
“Isn’t that what they always say? People. Out there. Three hundred
years old.”
“I’ve never heard that.”
“Just as I thought. They can’t be found in the world your kind lives in
—between you and me, there used to be one in this prison, but they let him
go.”
I meet a lot of people in my line of work, thought Kido, but I’ve rarely
come across anyone so shady. He checked his watch and tried to get the
conversation back on track. But Omiura prattled on heedlessly in a low
voice about his impression of the Three-Hundred-Year-Olds, now and then
drawing his face close to the partition. The whole thing was sheer nonsense.
When there were about fifteen minutes left in the visit, Kido lost patience
and cut him off.
“This is truly fascinating,” he said, “but today I’d like to ask you about
an incident from six years ago. Are you familiar with a man by the name of
Daisuké Taniguchi?”
After taking one glance at the photo Kido held up, Omiura let himself
fall back against his seat rest in a display of obvious annoyance, and then
stared up at the ceiling, looking bored. Kido’s gaze turned vacantly to the
corrections officer for a moment before he continued.
“A man who went by his name has passed away. But he wasn’t
Daisuké Taniguchi, and the real Taniguchi is missing. It’s just a hunch, but I
thought you might know something about their family register exchange.”
Omiura gave a flick of his chin and said, “You’re talking about the
second son from Ikaho Onsen?”
“Exactly!” said Kido, his eyes going wide. “Do you know him?”
 “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t . . . Should we cut our losses and call it
quits for the day?”
“I’m trying to find out who he exchanged family registers with. Would
you be so kind as to tell me?”
“It was no exchange. It’s called identity laundering. Think how many
people want to clean up their past, just like with dirty money. They’ve been
trying to climb the social ladder by messing with their family trees since
forever. I bet you’re one of them, aren’t you, sensei? I can see right through
you.”
Kido didn’t grace that with a reply.
“Hey, sensei. Next time you stop by, could you bring me some little
gifts?”
“. . . Pardon me?”
“I’d like that tabloid, Asahi Geino. Also, a book on the Heart Sutra.
Preferably something not too complicated.”
The corrections officer told them that their time was up. Kido nodded
in acknowledgment, but Omiura looked disappointed that Kido would be
leaving.
“You’re not a very Zainichi Zainichi,” he said, rising to his feet and
looking down at Kido. “Which is one way of saying that you’re as Zainichi
as it gets. Just like I’m not a very con-man con man.”
Omiura peeled back his lip to display his front teeth in another smile.
Kido was on the verge of exploding with rage. But he found that his knees
had gone weak and could do nothing but sit there and watch as Omiura left
the visiting room.

As time went by, Kido felt an emotion that approached hatred for Omiura
swelling inside him. He told himself that Omiura was just a scam artist he’d
met once by necessity for work. That the stuff about him being “not a very
Zainichi Zainichi” was probably a meaningless psychological game. But
every time Kido stood in front of the mirror after his visit to Yokohama
Prison, he felt as though he was facing the man through the clear partition.
It was deeply unsettling, and he wished that Omiura’s existence would be
wiped away from both the world and his memory.
 Learning that Omiura knew Daisuké Taniguchi had been a surprise. In
all likelihood, he knew something about X’s identity too. But thinking about
going back to meet him invariably put Kido in an awful mood. He never
wanted to speak with that man again. And as much as he would have liked
to prove that X hadn’t been a criminal for poor Rié’s sake, the case had
taken an ominous turn, and he now worried that something might have
happened to Daisuké Taniguchi after all.
Kido wrote another letter to Omiura. His hope was to disengage from
the case as soon as possible. While he couldn’t simply drop it, he wanted to
wrap things up quickly.
Ten days later, he visited Omiura again, this time with a copy of Asahi
Geino in hand. Omiura thanked him for the gift and provided a lengthy
appraisal of the nude spread of a female pop idol inside.
“When you get to be around my age, nude pics of young girls just
don’t do the trick anymore. Ladies around fifty are where it’s at. Say you’re
taking turns using the same bathwater with your family at home. You know
how the water is kind of stiff if you’re the first one to get in? It’s exactly the
same thing when you’re screwing. Young girls have tight bodies that are
just stiff as hell, even to look at in a photo. But the feeling on your skin of a
woman getting on into middle age is like bathwater that’s gone a bit soupy
after two, three people have had their soak. You’re still young, sensei, so I
know you feel me on this.”
After that, Omiura told a story about the time in university when
senior players on the rugby team had pressured him to appear in a “homo
video,” forcing him to skinny-dip in the sea at Kujukuri Beach in the still-
cold early spring before gang-raping him later at a hotel. He related this as
though it were an amusing anecdote about an unfortunate bit of bad luck,
and the visit ended, once again, with him merely hinting that he knew
something about X.
On Kido’s third visit, two days later, Omiura told a braggadocios tale
of the big earnings he’d made privately importing Viagra. He tried to recruit
Kido for the scheme once he got out of jail, assuring him it was both legal
and lucrative. When Kido delicately declined and asked again about the
connection between Daisuké Taniguchi and X, Omiura finally turned away
from him and began to whistle as though performing some kind of comedy
skit, cutting the visit short. After that, he ignored Kido’s letters.
Omiura was an eccentric, mercurial man. Truth and fiction were so
intricately glommed together in his stories that any attempt to strip away the
lies seemed to risk tearing the facts to indecipherability. To Kido, this
seemed more pathological than merely a matter of personality, and he
decided to hold off on contacting him for a while to see how he might react.
Eventually, Kido received eight postcards in the mail, one after the
next. They were copies of the nude picture from that issue of Asahi Geino,
done with a ballpoint pen. As Kido was studying these sloppily drawn
reproductions, he became somewhat sad. He began to suspect that, out of
everything Omiura had talked about, it was his experience of being raped in
the porno that he had most wanted to convey. Kido had dismissed the story
as farfetched, but now wondered if Omiura might have been hoping for
some kind of lawyerly advice or maybe just human compassion.
Omiura seemed to grow tired of reproducing nudes, because he then
began to send drawings of the bodhisattva Kannon sitting on a rock by the
waterside looking at a reflection of the moon. At this point, Kido sent him a
letter of thanks and applied for another meeting. Omiura’s response came
immediately. The letter was addressed, “Dear Korean!” and Kido couldn’t
tell whether this was meant to be friendly or mocking. The main body
simply read, “Are your eyes just empty holes, Handsome Lawyer Sensei?
C-H-U-M-P!” The lines of the characters had been traced over numerous
times for emphasis.
After this, his drawings reverted to raunchy nudes. The subject of his
copying had switched from the tabloid photo to what appeared to be an
image from a manga in which a middle-aged woman with fulsomely
exaggerated breasts held them up in an iron grip. But when Kido looked
more carefully, he discovered that encircling the right nipple were small
characters that read, “Daisuké Taniguchi” and encircling the left nipple,
“Yoshihiko Sonézaki.”
When Nakakita passed by his desk, Kido showed him the postcard
without a word. Nakakita frowned, looked at the front, and broke into
exasperated laughter with his neck crooked in disbelief.
“This Yoshihiko Sonézaki,’” he said, turning to Kido. “I guess
Omiura’s trying to say he’s X?”
 “That’s how it appears . . . though it’s the first time I’ve ever come
across that name . . .”
Kido wrote a letter seeking confirmation but received no reply, and
Omiura would no longer accept his requests to visit.
 CHAPTER ELEVEN

On the last Sunday of October, Rié, her mother, Yuto, and Hana drove to
Burial Mound Park on the outskirts of town to view the cosmos blossoms,
which were set to reach full bloom slightly earlier than in most years.
Hana often referred to the park as “my park” and was delighted to join
them for a visit, but Yuto, who had been spending an increasing amount of
time indoors of late, was reluctant at first, saying that he wanted to read a
book. As Rié had not started reading books for pleasure until well into her
adult years and had never been a big reader, she was astounded by Yuto’s
voracity. Even more so because the books he brought home from the library
were all literary classics, including works by Soseki Natsume, Naoya Shiga,
and Saneatsu Mushanokoji. Yuto seemed to especially like Ryunosuke
Akutagawa and would buy the bunko editions, flipping through them at
every spare moment. Whenever she asked him if he enjoyed what he was
reading, he would reply simply that he did, without elaborating any further.
Just last autumn, she had been warning him about playing too many video
games; now, only a year later, he never even touched them.
After lunch, Yuto had gone upstairs and refused to come down. It was
only after his grandmother asked that he obediently agreed to tag along.
Without Rié making any serious effort to instill this quality in him, Yuto
had always revered his grandparents. Not once had she seen him take a
rebellious attitude toward them, and he would listen to his grandmother
about something when Rié only made him grumble. Of course, his
grandmother, for her part, felt profoundly sorry for him after the series of
misfortunes he had undergone and lavished him with attention, not to
mention an excess of sweets and toys.
 Although this does not directly concern their trip to Burial Mound
Park that day, it is worth mentioning at this point a certain incident. Not
long after Rié’s second marriage and the second anniversary of the death of
her father, Yuto and his grandmother went to the local pet shop to buy
goldfish and installed an old aquarium in the entrance to their home.
Neither Rié nor her now late husband had been informed and were startled
when they stepped in the door after work.
“What’s this?” she had asked. “I didn’t know you wanted a pet
goldfish.”
“It’s just because Grandma looks so lonely ever since Grandpa died,”
Yuto explained.
Rié recognized the aquarium, having used it herself as a child until all
her goldfish died. It had then ended up in the shed, where it had been
collecting dust for more than thirty years.
“So when you went out with your grandmother to buy them, that was
for her?”
“Yeah . . . I thought it might take her mind off things.”
“Why goldfish?”
“Because I saw Grandma looking at the aquarium in the shed. Just fish
are OK, right, Mom? I’ll look after them.”
Rié was deeply moved by Yuto’s kindness.
“Yuto is growing up to be a good boy,” her late husband had said, his
eyes narrowed with tenderness. “A very thoughtful boy.”
That night, after the kids were in bed, Rié asked her mother what had
led them to visit the pet shop.
“It’s just because little Yuto looks so lonely ever since Grandpa died.”
Rié couldn’t help laughing. “So you didn’t want goldfish?”
“They’re for Yuto,” her mother replied, looking at Rié distrustfully,
not seeing what was so funny.
“Yuto said exactly the same thing,” Rié explained.
“What?”
When Rié related what Yuto had told her, her mother looked
dumbfounded, but was soon laughing along with Rié and eventually grew
teary-eyed. Apparently, the two of them had discovered the aquarium while
Yuto was helping his grandmother look for something in the shed. Yuto had
then cleaned it with the garden hose; searched online for the gravel, air
pumps, and other items they would need; gone with her to buy them; and
even installed the aquarium himself.
Rié was glad that her mother and her son had been forming a
connection unbeknownst to her. Two people that she loved also loved each
other without the need for her to mediate their affection. And sharing in
their sadness and isolation, they were trying to soothe each other’s pain and
assuage each other’s loneliness. For Rié, it was a mysterious joy, and the
mere thought of what they might be talking about when she wasn’t around
brought a ticklish warmth to her breast.
Although Yuto was easily bored and tended to lose interest the
moment he’d found something he was passionate about, taking care of the
goldfish was the one thing he never neglected or burdened his family with.
He kept it up even after his second dad died.

The tumulus mounds at Burial Mound Park stretched in an ellipse with a

diameter half the width of a soccer field, like a bellybutton surrounded by
fields of cosmos that covered the park as far as the eye could see. Said to
number some three million, these red, pink, and purple blossoms
ensconcing yellow stamen and pistils shimmered atop their green stems.
Counting the smaller mounds, there were a total of 319 tumuli scattered
throughout the vast park. Originally they had formed a barren landscape
that seemed connected to nothing but the past, until a city initiative began to
add color. Now each season revealed different flowers: cherry and mustard
in the spring, sunflowers in the summer. Going to see them had been a
family tradition since Rié was a child. Her late husband had loved the
scenery so much that he named their daughter Hana, or “flower,” which was
why the little girl thought of it as her park.
When they arrived at Burial Mound Park that day, the usually empty
parking lot was full of cars with license plates from various regions, both
inside and outside Miyazaki Prefecture. The neatly arrayed walking paths
that cut through the fields of flowers bustled with families, and in every
direction, amateur photographers could be seen cradling tripods topped by
hefty cameras. The weather was pleasant and clear, with a mild wind—the
sort of bright, vibrant day that one wished would continue all year round.
 “Hana, go stand beside those cosmos,” said Rié’s mother. “Are you
just about there?”
Hana stood in front of the field of flowers and begged Rié to take a
picture. It always thrilled her to check her height against the cosmos and to
compare the pictures from each year side by side. She was still small
enough to disappear amidst the flowers if Rié wasn’t careful and had kept
Rié busy the previous year chasing her down every time she scampered off.
Now, as Rié steadied her phone to take the shot, she thought that within a
year or two Hana might outgrow the flowers. Behind her daughter, the
rearing blossoms began to sway from left to right under a slight breeze, as
though stretching to get a look at Rié and her family through the tight
crowd.

Yuto had been silent on the ride over and had remained so since they
stepped out of the car. Now, he gazed vacantly at the flowers as he kept a
watchful eye on Hana, his hands stuffed into the pocket of his gray hoodie,
stretching it down as though his belly were carrying an anchor.
Rié studied him from behind, considering his profile whenever it
angled into view, and wondered again how he must have felt to lose his
brother, his grandfather, and the man he had thought of as his dad. In spite
of his growth spurt this past year, he was still just a boy, as his gangly build
attested. Even as an adult, Rié felt empty, as though the most precious parts
inside her had been shorn away, leaving her so off balance and dizzy she
could barely stay on her feet. She should have realized earlier that, like her,
he was enduring the pain without expressing it. No doubt as he tended the
goldfish, looked out for his little sister, read books, he was struggling just to
hold himself together.
Her poor son. He hadn’t fully grasped the meaning of death when Ryo
passed away, but he was bound to come to his own thoughts and feelings
about it in the coming years. Even Rié had contemplated death as a
teenager, albeit vaguely, despite having yet to experience the loss of a loved
one herself. Yuto had been deeply attached to his second dad, more so than
X’s actual child, Hana, because of how old they were when he was alive.
And whenever Rié racked her brain for things she might do for Yuto as a
mother, she wished, paradoxically, that her late husband were there to give
him advice.
With each passing day, her grief seemed to grow indistinct as it
gradually, soundlessly crumbled, spilling into the flow of time and slowly
unburdening her heart. This brought her relief—she was leaving the crisis
behind—even if, in place of the anguish immediately following his death, a
new kind of loneliness sometimes seeped through the depths of her body.
There were some who suggested she remarry, but she would only shake her
head with a smile and tell them she’d had enough.
Now Rié was more aware of her age than ever. She compared herself
to her father, who had died at only sixty-seven, and sensed her own
approach to the end gaining ineluctable momentum. Death terrified her, and
yet imagining Ryo and her father waiting for her always took the edge off
her dread. Even Ryo, a wee toddler, had accepted his death, a death that she
had not been able to undergo in his place . . . The thought that he might be
waiting anxiously to see her almost made her want to die as fast as she
could. More than anything, she wanted to finally apologize for subjecting
him to that pointless treatment.
Rié wasn’t sure when she had begun to conceive of Ryo’s death not as
something that made him vanish in the past but as something that allowed
him to wait for her in the future, his existence not receding but approaching.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t the sort of person who could fully convince
herself of this. Taking the belief seriously entailed that she might keep Ryo
waiting in heaven for another forty-odd years, and that was something she
could not bear to do to him, even with his grandfather there as guardian.
Nevertheless, as admittedly unreasonable as it was, the idea that her most
cherished loved ones had gone to the great beyond for her sake soothed her
fear of following them and gave her something to lean on in the solitary
here and now.
It was impossible for her to picture her father aging in the afterlife.
But what about Ryo? If he was alive, he would be eleven. Moving had
spared her the pain of having to watch his day care playmates grow up.
Those diapered, toddling infants would in two years be donning uniforms
for middle school. Next year would be ten years since he passed. Time flies,
she thought to herself. Time flies.
Rié received word from Kido that, although he still hadn’t figured out X’s
identity, he had made some progress with the case. As apprehensive as she
was to learn the truth, worried it would be an unsettling tale, she still
wanted desperately to know who her husband had been. For upon this
knowledge hinged not only the possibility of clearing the haze around his
existence but around her own past as well. And unable to rush Kido,
especially considering the modest sum for which he was investigating, she
had no choice but to be patient.
Yuto continued to keep his back turned toward her, and Rié could tell
that this was his way of criticizing her for not explaining why she had
neglected to deal with the death of his second dad. Afraid she might hurt his
feelings further, she had been unable to broach the topic openly since that
time in his bedroom.
“Yuto, what book were you reading before we left?” Rié asked. They
had just reached the rows of cherry trees, already bare of their leaves.
“. . . Nothing really,” he replied.
“I’ve never heard of a book called ‘nothing really,’” said Rié, poking
him lightly in the shoulder with a smile.
“It was one of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s,” said Yuto.
“You really like him, eh, Yuto? I read some of his short stories years
ago. Like ‘Yam Gruel’ and ‘Flatcar.’”
Yuto let that pass without comment, his face downcast, wearing a look
of indifference.
“What’s the story about?” asked Rié.
“It’s not a story. It’s kind of a poem.” Yuto told her the title, but Rié
couldn’t catch it.
“Sorry, what’s that?”
“‘Asakusa Park.’”
“I’ve never heard of it . . . That’s by Akutagawa?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it about?”
Yuto shrugged.
“Don’t be like that to your mother. Tell me.”
 “. . . When the main character passes in front of an artificial flower
shop, a tiger lily goes, ‘Look how beautiful I am,’ and he replies, ‘But
aren’t you an artificial flower?’”
“I don’t get it. That’s weird.” Rié gave a wry smile. “You find that
interesting, Yuto?”
“. . . Yeah. But it’s difficult.”
“You’re learning how to think thoughts that are beyond even your
mother. When you’re done, let me read it.”
“Not happening.”
“Why?”
“For one thing, I underlined parts of it.”
Rié studied her son’s profile with tender concern, smiling. “I see,” she
said. “Then I guess I’ll just have to go buy a copy.”
“I doubt you’d . . . find it interesting.”
“Hey! What are you trying to imply?”
At last a hint of a smile crept onto Yuto’s face.
“Even if it’s not interesting for me, I want to know what sort of things
you’re into.”
“Don’t worry about it, Mom. It’s got nothing to do with you.”
“Nope. I’m just going to have to read it myself, whether you like it or
not.”
“Quit it about my books already.”
Scratching his head, Yuto waved his other hand as if to shake off his
mother’s nosiness. He then glanced back to check on Hana and Grandma
and, finding them looking at something along the edge of the path, turned to
face Rié again.
“Mom,” he said, “do you remember Dad’s tree?”
“Of course. That one, right? The third tree over, with branches like
this . . .”
After Rié remarried, they had all come to this spot in Burial Mound
Park, and she had proposed that they each pick out their favorite cherry tree.
Rié’s tree was a bit farther ahead, Yuto’s was two removed from his dad’s,
and Hana’s had been chosen for her by Yuto since she was still in utero. The
strange thing was that, the next time they came, the trees they had claimed
for themselves had become different from all the others somehow, the
object of their special affection.
 Every year after that, they would visit in spring and compare the
blossoms on their trees to decide whose had the most impressive bloom.
While Yuto’s tree had lost out to Rié’s husband’s in the year of his death, it
took the prize the year after. Ever since, Yuto had wanted to stand before his
dad’s grave and tell him, but was still waiting for the opportunity. Now
another spring had passed. And this year Rié had not brought them to see
the flowers here.
Rié stopped in front of her dead husband’s denuded tree and looked up
at it. She doubted he had seen all two thousand trees said to have been
planted in this park. But of those he had considered, this one had called out
to him for whatever reason, and with each turn of the seasons, he had stood
right here in this spot and stared at it as though it were his doppelganger.
She still didn’t know anything about his past. But she knew that, whoever
he was, he had been the sort of person who, with so many trees to choose
from, preferred this one.
“Mother. The anniversary of Dad’s death has come and gone again,”
said Yuto. “But you still haven’t made a grave for him.”
He spoke in a controlled voice that Rié wouldn’t have thought possible
for a child. She didn’t think she had it in her to explain right then. But she
could tell that he wasn’t going to let her get away with a vague reply this
time.
“There’s something I’ve been keeping from you,” she said.
“What?”
“Dad . . . His name wasn’t really Daisuké Taniguchi.”
“. . . Huh?”
“I know . . . it’s strange . . . But when he died, I found out it wasn’t his
real name. Daisuké Taniguchi’s brother came to visit, and he told me Dad
wasn’t his brother.”
“I don’t get it . . .”
“He was going by someone else’s name.”
Yuto’s pupils quivered, his lips parted. “Then . . . who was he?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out this whole time. I went to
the police. I hired a lawyer.”
“And who was he?”
“I still don’t know. That’s why I can’t make him a grave.”
“Then . . . My name, Yuto Taniguchi. What is that?”
 “Taniguchi is just a name Dad used for a while. The name of someone
we don’t know.”
“Is that why you went back to your maiden name?”
After Rié nodded, Yuto just stared at her in bewilderment. It was as
though he wasn’t even sure what to feel.
“Then . . . what about the story Dad told me? About his home in Ikaho
Onsen, and having a fight with his family, and coming here after he ran
away.”
Rié hesitated for a moment but decided there was no use being
evasive, and looking Yuto straight in the eye, said, “That isn’t his past. It’s
Daisuké Taniguchi’s.”
“He was lying?” Yuto tensed his paling cheeks.
Saying nothing, Rié gave two slight nods.
“What the hell . . . he tricked us. All of us? Huh . . . why? Dad . . .
Why did he lie? What did he do?”
“I don’t know any more than you do. There was no way for me to
explain. I wanted to wait until everything became a bit clearer before I told
you . . . I just don’t know.”
They stood together in silence for a time. Presently Hana skipped over,
holding hands with Grandma.
“Mama, look, it’s Papa’s tree!”
“It sure is.”
“This I think. Um, Papa thought maybe we’ll be coming today, so he
went inside his tree to hide and wait.”
Rié was reluctant to turn her attention away from Yuto, but she looked
down at Hana with a smile and said, “Could be.”
“Hey. Mama. Take a picture.”
“OK. Want me to take one of you with Papa’s tree?”
“Yeah! Then I want one with my tree too.”
Hana was the first to take her place in front of the tree, followed by
Grandma. Yuto remained where he was at first, but upon his grandmother’s
urging slunk over beside them.
“OK. Smiiile,” Rié said in singsong. But through the display of her
smartphone, she saw Yuto giving her a deadpan stare. And with a click of
the shutter, she captured his expression.
 “Rié, you go stand over there too,” said her mother. “I’ll take this
one.”
As instructed, Rié took Hana’s hand and lined up beside Yuto, but
found herself no better able than him to put on a bright face.
 CHAPTER TWELVE

In the capacious lobby of the Yokohama District Court, Kido stood, talking
with his two clients about the fifth oral argument hearing that had just
concluded. These were the parents of the man who had committed suicide
after working unconscionably long hours. Kido had been serving as their
lawyer in the suit for almost two years. Now, with public outcry growing
ever more heated, the accused izakaya chain was finally showing signs that
it might be moving toward a settlement.
As Kido and his clients would report on the hearing later that day at a
debriefing session attended by the labor unions, they reconfirmed their
strategy going forward. Then the father looked Kido straight in the eye and
said, “Sensei, it’s not about whether we win or lose. We want to know what
actually happened, why our boy died.”
“Yes, of course,” said Kido with a nod, conveying his understanding
of what drove them on this long fight.
While the father’s forehead was broad, he had a full head of mostly
white hair, which he kept close-cropped and tidy. With long eyebrows
slanting out over eyes shaped like set squares that always glittered moistly,
his face universally aroused pity whenever it appeared in the media,
contributing to the already growing sympathy for the case.
“Let’s keep marching on. We’re headed in the right direction.”
Kido used these phrases regularly, and his clients never seemed
particularly heartened by them, but over the past two years they had grown
fond of his tone when he said it, and this time it appeared to stir their
emotions.
“You’ve been a great help to us, sensei, I mean it. In the beginning we
were completely at a loss. It’s thanks to you we’ve managed to keep our
heads on straight. Even if the case can never bring our boy back to us . . .”
“Let’s keep marching on,” Kido repeated, acknowledging what the
father had said with restraint and decorum. In his heart he was moved,
knowing that the man’s words were sincere.

Kido had been in a state of constant irritation all day after shouting at his
son for being sulky and uncooperative about getting dressed that morning.
He had been holding down the fort with Sota since the previous day
when his wife left for a business trip to Osaka, and the two of them had had
an uneventful evening together, eating a quick dinner at a family restaurant
before bath and then bedtime as usual. The problem had begun that morning
when Kido awoke to find Sota watching a Doraemon movie on DVD on the
TV in the living room. From that moment on, whatever Kido tried to get
him to do, whether it was have breakfast or wash his face, Sota invariably
dragged his feet. At first Kido was worried that he might have caught a
cold, but Sota had no fever and shook his head when asked if he was feeling
sick. After Sota nonetheless persistently refused to come to the breakfast
table, Kido’s tone grew increasingly harsh. And with an appointment at
9:30, he watched the clock with growing impatience.
Sota hadn’t been his usual stable self since Kaori gave him a fierce
scolding for not doing his Kumon math homework two weeks earlier. As
Kido had never been one to approve of forcing huge amounts of study on
young children, he had tried to defend his son, claiming that there was no
need to teach him arithmetic so thoroughly at this stage because he was
bound to learn it soon enough anyway. This had set Kaori off, and the
conversation quickly flared into an argument. From his divorce mediation
work, Kido knew just how common it was for disagreements around
childrearing to cause deep-rooted discord between couples. But his and
Kaori’s inability to have a calm discussion about such a trifling issue was
unusual. And telling Kaori, out of consideration for her, that she seemed
tired out from escorting the boy back and forth to his many lessons only
succeeded in fanning the flames. The end result was that Sota received a
savage earful from his mother.
 When Kido saw how Kaori treated their child, it was the first time he
seriously considered divorce. That their life together stressed her out was
obvious, and since he wished her the best whatever might happen between
them, he wondered if she might do better to start over with a new partner.
Then perhaps she would regain her former composure. Perhaps Kido would
too.
He had trouble finding any sign that she loved him, and if someone
were to ask him whether he loved her, he would have been at a loss for
words. Even so, he could never have outright denied his love for her.
After ten years living in wedlock, their relationship was slowly
coming apart, without any particular inciting incident he could point to, and
Kido kept trying to think of some way that they might set it right. Over the
past few months, they hadn’t touched once, maintaining a wary distance
between their bodies like strangers, as if to ensure that they didn’t brush
against each other even by accident. In all fairness to Kaori, she too was
making efforts to restrain herself and prevent their fights from escalating.
She took great care not to become emotional with Kido, though in
compensation, her berating of Sota would sometimes rise to a furious pitch.
Never before had Kido seen her behave the way she did with him at such
times, not in the whole decade they had lived together.
Sota had his own role to play in the friction between his parents.
Recently, he had been rebelling ferociously against his mother’s imperious
commands, as an entirely normal part of the development of his sense of
self, and their relationship could only be described as a vicious cycle.
Kido’s attempt to bring this problem to Kaori’s attention had been utterly
inadequate, no more than a timid suggestion, fearful that the slightest
interference might destroy their marriage forever. To make up for this
failure, he consoled Sota in his room and in the bath, hugging him and
letting him talk, all the while hating himself for this disingenuous evasion
of his responsibility. How far he had strayed from the sort of father he
wished to be.
Kido was aware that he was the cause of his wife’s growing
discontent. At the same time, he could tell that something more
fundamental underlay the irritation that engendered her preposterous
suspicion of his infidelity, and he invariably shrunk back whenever he
reached the threshold of understanding it. Instead he would seek a
momentary escape from reality in his go-to diversion, the ongoing search
for X.
If their falling-out had only concerned husband and wife, Kido might
have accepted it. What tore him apart was the impact it was having on their
son. Not that he had some grand theory of childrearing he was trying to live
up to. His only hope was that Sota might one day look back and feel certain
that he had been raised with love. This was a goal that even Kaori should
have thought worth pursuing.
As Sota had never been disobedient to his father, Kido had deluded
himself into believing that they had a special relationship of mutual trust,
even as he despised his own mendacious kindness. But as soon as Kaori had
left town, Sota’s frustration at the position they placed him in found a new
outlet, the only one at hand. And although Kido should have seen it coming,
he flew into an unseemly rage at Sota’s willfulness that morning, pelting
him with the socks he refused to put on, placing his hand on his head, and
bellowing, “Behave!”
Perhaps “placed” isn’t right. More likely, that gesture of rebuke was a
slap. And realizing this instantly, Kido left his hand where it was, gripping
his son’s head in anger, in a half-unconscious attempt to conceal what he
had done. Frightened, Sota stopped crying, and Kido stared at his hand.
Everything about violence that he rejected could be found in the force of
that grip.
Kido felt as though something vile had burst inside his chest. When he
stepped away for a moment, Sota put on his socks, sobbing, his face beet
red. Kido hugged him until his tears ceased. Then, without a word, he took
him to day care, and the moment he watched his son disappear inside, was
stricken with sorrow and regret.
Every time Kido encountered tragic cases of child abuse in his divorce
suits, his heart went out to the children. At the same time, he tried to have
some understanding for the parents who could not help their behavior due
to their innate disposition and environment. He was able to maintain this
outlook because he had seen himself as belonging to an entirely different
category of person. Now, for the first time, he took seriously the possibility
that if the conditions of his life were different, he might have become a
child beater. Picturing this hypothetical scenario amounted to a profound
loss of faith in himself. Even his comforting Sota at the end was just like
the honeymoon phase in a textbook cycle of domestic violence and
reconciliation.

Just after six o’clock, Kido went to pick up Sota from his day care in the
Motomachi-Chukagai Station building. When Kido arrived, Sota hurriedly
put away the blocks he and his friends had been playing with and
scampered over to Kido, wearing a broad smile. The teacher reported that
Sota had made it through the day without any problems. Sota cavorted with
his friends as though reluctant to leave, and the kids all gathered to say their
usual parting words, “Together, farewell!” before Kido and Sota left.
The ocean wind was strong that night. A Christmas light display
sparkled on the silhouettes of trees lining the streets.
With the vibrant glow of Motomachi in the corner of his eye, Kido
was waiting with Sota for the light when he spotted a strange man
repeatedly kicking a utility pole for no apparent reason. Instinctively, he
squeezed Sota’s hand and retreated a few paces. As the man remained
where he was after the light turned green, they immediately left him behind.
Sota was silent, but Kido thought he sensed him speeding up.
Every time they reached an intersection, a chill wind blasted them
from the canyon of buildings. As Kido buttoned up the front of his coat, he
grew concerned about Sota’s fingertips sticking out from his sheltering
hand.
“Are you cold? Everything OK?”
“Yeah . . . Hey, Daddy?”
“What is it, son?”
“How come Ultraman can shout ‘shuwatch’ and stuff when his mouth
doesn’t move?”
“Oh.” Kido pictured Ultraman’s immobile, metallic face. “I wonder.”
He shrugged with a smile.
Eyes wide and fervent, Sota explained how little sense it made.
“True . . . ,” Kido acknowledged. “But, well, Ultraman can fly and
shoot his Specium Ray and do all kinds of incredible things, so I bet talking
without moving his mouth is a piece of cake.”
 Kido was quite pleased with himself for this answer, but his reasoning
did not seem to satisfy Sota in the least.
Upon returning home, they had a dinner of spaghetti with meat sauce
and frozen hamburger patties. Then, before Sota could turn on the
television, Kido went over to the couch, sat Sota on his lap, and said, “I’m
sorry for shouting at you this morning.”
“That’s OK,” said Sota with a nod, more interested in turning on the
television ASAP than in what his father was saying.
“I was in a rush because I thought I was going to be late for work. You
wouldn’t have wanted to be late for day care either, would you? See, that’s
why I got mad.”
“OK.”
“Tomorrow morning—look at me—let’s make sure to get ready fast
enough so we can be on time.”
“OK.”
“Good. That’s all. You can go ahead and watch TV now.” Kido patted
his son on the head and embraced his tiny body once more.

After bath time, they went to Sota’s room and lay in bed with the lights out.
“Daddy.”
“What is it, son?” said Kido, stretched out in the darkness beside him.
“If you saw me and my double, would you know which one was the
real me?”
“Um, what do you mean?”
Sota told him about the Anpanman picture book the day care teachers
had read them in which the villain, Baikinman, went around posing as
Anpanman.
“Ah, now I get it . . . Of course I’d know. You’re my son.”
“How could you tell?”
“Just by looking at you. And by your voice.”
“But what if he looked and sounded just like me?”
“Then . . . I guess I’d ask him about things only you would remember.
Where did we go for vacation last summer?”
“Hawaii!”
 “Exactly. Even if your double looked like you on the outside, he still
wouldn’t have your memories, now would he?”
“Oh yeah. You’re amazing, Daddy! So if your double shows up,
should I ask him about his memories too?”
“Definitely.”
“Then . . . When we went to Hawaii, did you eat a steak as big as a
straw sandal or not?”
“I sure did—but better not ask my double like that or you’ll give away
the answer.”
As they continued to talk in this way, the gaps in their conversation
gradually widened until eventually Kido could hear soft, peaceful breathing
beside him. He waited in the dark while it rapidly deepened before fixing
Sota’s blanket and slipping quietly out of his room.
Kido had been putting off decorating their Christmas tree and decided
to get it done before bed. So, throwing on a CD of Masabumi Kikuchi and
Masahiko Togashi duets, he took out the cardboard box with the
decorations. Inside, he found the lights and silver and gold ornaments
exactly as he had packed them a year earlier. Somehow, at the sight of the
components of their fake tree, he remembered that Rié had contacted him
seeking advice about X at around the same time. The speed at which the
year had gone by astonished him. It was a feeling that came upon him on an
almost monthly basis.
While assembling the tree, Kido recalled the night he had sat in this
room, drinking vodka by himself after putting Sota to bed, and pondered the
meaning of that intense feeling of joy he had experienced. Once the tree
was ready, he placed it by the glass door leading to the veranda, wrapped it
with LEDs, and hung the stars and baubles from the branches for the
finishing touch. After all that procrastination, it had been a mere fifteen-
minute operation. Turning on the Christmas lights and dimming the ones in
the room, he inspected his work from a few paces away. Reflected in the
glass behind the tree was the room with him standing there all alone.
Kido was thinking of having a few drinks like the last time, when a
song he worshipped came on—Masabumi Kikuchi’s solo piano rendition of
“All the Things You Are”—and suddenly he lost all desire to be anywhere
else. The tempo seemed to slowly dismantle time, each note a clear droplet
that fell and spread overlapping ripples through the silent interior. It wasn’t
amidst the music itself but in the melding of his anticipation of its sounds
and their lingering resonance that Kido stilled his breath, gazing at the
lights as they cycled through their repeating pattern.
He was interrupted finally from his reverie when his cell phone
beeped with an incoming Line message. He reached for his phone atop the
table. It was Kaori.

How are you two holding up?

Is Sota being a good boy?

It was unusual for her to contact him during a business trip, and Kido
thought this might be her way of expressing her concern about their recent
conflict. Although the message was a mere two lines long, he was happy to
see it, hopeful that she might come back refreshed by the change of scenery.
She had said she would be travelling with her new boss, but Kido wasn’t
worried about her because he was supposed to be a capable man, so much
so that Kaori had recently stopped complaining about her job.

Yeah, we’re ne.

He’s being good.
Good luck with your trip!

To his reply, Kido added emojis for the first time in he couldn’t
remember how long.
Kaori sent back a sticker with the English phrase “Thank you!!”
attached to a character he didn’t recognize. It was smiling more cheerfully
than Kido had seen Kaori smile for ages.
After fiddling with his phone at the dining table for a while, Kido
recalled Misuzu’s Three-Steps-Forward-Four-Steps-Backism. He now
clearly recognized his attraction to her. Still, he was not prepared to carry
their relationship to the next stage. He never had been. The very idea of
them getting together was so unrealistic that he didn’t even treat it as a
serious possibility. Nevertheless, there was something about her that
irresistibly stirred up visions of what life might be like with her as his
partner. He felt more comfortable with himself in their online
communications than in any other context. And whenever he saw her
picture on Facebook, with her happy-go-lucky vibe and joyful, spontaneous
smile, he imagined the days passing with her by his side, wondering how
everything might have turned out if he had married her and she had been
Sota’s mother instead. Of course this was nothing more than a fantasy of an
alternate life that, while possible perhaps in another world, could never
have been a reality in this one.
Kido doubted that he would have approached this conundrum with
such hesitation and putative good sense if he had been younger, whether
married or otherwise. And yet the impulse that, back then, might have
prodded him into action and forcefully yanked him along—namely, his
libido—had marked a shy retreat and would now only be there for him in
the pursuit if he insisted. To think, this was the very same libido that so
tormented him over his sexless marriage! The idea of, conversely, having to
give his libido a prod and yank it along was simply too daunting to
consider. Though, in his twenties, Kido would have flatly dismissed such
pretense to enervated maturity as a bunch of bald-faced lies . . .
In any case, giving himself over to a sudden destructive urge for some
giddy middle-aged pipe dream, throwing away the life he had painstakingly
built and starting a new one with Misuzu, had to be the exact opposite of
the grounded, compromising way of according with existence exemplified
by the philosophy of Three-Steps-Forward-Four-Steps-Backism that had so
greatly impressed him.

For the first time, Kido wondered if X might have been a perfectly normal
guy who simply got bored with his life and decided that he wanted a new
one. As the conversation with Sota suggested, memories make people who
they are. Thus, if you possessed the memories of another, wouldn’t it be
possible to become them?
Perhaps X was sitting alone late one night, overburdened with the
weariness of life, just like me right now, when he discovered Omiura on the
internet. Just a frivolous man who yearned for a touch more stimulation,
and murder had nothing to do with it.
 Kido had tried searching online for Yoshihiko Sonézaki, one of the
names from Omiura’s nude manga copy, but had failed to turn up a criminal
record, or, for that matter, any sign that the man existed. Given that X
seemed to have been involved with a shady character like Omiura, Kido
leaned toward the supposition that X had been mixed up in some kind of
crime, and felt less inclined to sympathize with him. At the same time,
something told him that X’s life had to have been innocuous enough that
Daisuké Taniguchi would deem it worth trading for simply to escape his
poor relationship with his family. Or could he have been after money?
Whatever the truth might turn out to be, Kido knew that Rié would
want to know it. There was no other way for her to heal the rifts in her
family, and Kido reminded himself how urgent it was to sort out his own
home situation once this empty game of make-believe detective had drawn
to a conclusion.

That night, Kido’s interest in that game was fading fast, and he might have
soon convinced himself to call it quits. But thanks to an unexpected turn of
events two weeks later, he stumbled upon the true identity of X and found
himself fully absorbed once again.
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

It was three days before Christmas when Kido, after finishing up some
work at the Tokyo District Court, headed to Shibuya for an exhibition of art
curated from the submissions of convicts on death row. He had heard about
it from one of the event organizers, a lawyer friend named Sugino who was
an ardent supporter of the movement to abolish capital punishment in
Japan.
Although Kido was opposed to capital punishment, he had never been
directly involved in the movement, nor did he have experience defending
clients in criminal cases where the prosecution sought the death penalty.
Rather, what drew him to the exhibition was a newly discovered interest in
the art of convicts, kindled by his encounter with Omiura and the peculiar
postcards he’d sent from prison. What if this tragicomic puzzle of a con
man had been awaiting that fatal retribution? His drawings would no doubt
have had a completely different character. He would be living between a
murder he had committed in the past and an execution at the hands of the
state that awaited him in the future. Kido was curious to see what sort of art
people actually in such a predicament might create in the present.
Snow was falling as he walked from Shibuya Station to the small
gallery beside the Tokyu Department Store where the exhibition was being
held. With the weather report warning of accumulation that night, even in
the center of Tokyo, the front of his jacket was covered in white in spite of
his umbrella. He walked swiftly, bringing a glow of warmth to the inside of
his numbed cheeks.
The gallery was on the sixth floor of a building stacked with bars and
restaurants. As Kido was dusting himself off at the entrance, Sugino
thanked him for making the trek in such atrocious weather, and Kido
commiserated with him about the cold. Sugino was scheduled to serve as
the moderator for a talk later on.
Inside, the white hardwood floor was wet with tracked-in snow and
Kido watched a woman in front of him almost slip and fall. Chairs had
already been set up for the audience, and he was surprised to see that the
large event space was packed. Worried about his train home being delayed
or cancelled, he slung his coat over a chair at the back, planning to slip out
early.

The exhibition showcased several dozen artists. Their work ranged in size
from large pieces that reached toward the ceiling to those pieces no bigger
than a postcard. Cobbled-together papers and ad hoc additions of color
betrayed the great pains the convicts had taken to make the most of their
limited materials. Listed beside each piece was its title, the name of the
creator, and the unofficial name of the case for which they had been
convicted. As no other details were provided, some attendees searched on
their phones while making their way around the room.
Near the entrance was a large piece made up of two paintings. Each
was composed of conjoined B4 paper sheets, hung one on top of the other
to form a single continuous scene. One depicted a naked woman on her
knees at the bottom of an enormous dry well, trying to climb up the brick
wall. The painting above revealed a narrow view of the blue sky far, far
above and green flowering plants in the tranquil sunlight. Kido interpreted
this light as the artist’s accumulated memory of the glimmers seen daily
through the prison window. The thirsting after freedom suggested by the
perspective gestured toward hopelessness, while the contrast between the
dazzling light and the increasingly thick gradations of darkness down the
well elicited a sense of anguish.
The case was of a married couple who owned a pet shop and who had
killed four customers in succession before destroying the bodies. The artist
was the wife. She had claimed innocence ever since her arrest. As the
incident was well known, the piece had been featured prominently in the
flyer for the exhibition.
 Another piece of hers beside it depicted the ground in what had to be
early fall. Through a scattering of young pine cones and fallen green leaves
marched a line of ants. Oddly, the scene incorporated countless grenades
and the white foot of a woman trying to walk through without shoes. Kido
noted that the bare feet of the woman in the well had likewise been
emphasized. Both works seemed to imply the artist’s innocence, while a
third work made a more direct declaration in words. It was more like a
poster than a painting, and Kido was immediately taken by the excellence
of the image.
Beside these was work by another woman. She also claimed
innocence, in this case for the crime of mass poisoning, and was in the
middle of petitioning the Supreme Court for a retrial. Displayed were about
ten of her pieces, each the size of a square of origami paper. Kido followed
a couple ahead of him in the crowd and stopped in front of one: against a
black background, a thick red line ran horizontally through the center,
drooping in the middle, and a droplet like a tear of blood hung down.
According to the explanation Kido had read on the exhibition website, the
line represented the neck laceration left by the rope in a hanging and the
droplet the tears of the family.
In a second neighboring work, a square the size of a bean enclosing a
red circle had been drawn against a blue background. The website had said
that this represented the entrapment and loneliness of being cut off from
blue skies in prison. The works of this artist appeared to be abstract
diagrams of her fear of death and belief in her innocence set within squarish
frames. While they suffered from a shortage of drawing implements and a
lack of finesse, Kido thought that all possessed a certain power that seemed
to compress the being of the spectator. He stopped in front of them one by
one, each time holding his breath at first and then eventually letting it out in
a long sigh.
Her work seemed to him closer to graphic design than anything else.
This reminded him of the familiar concept of the artistic quality of
promotional representation, but he decided that there should be more
discussion of its contrary, the promotional quality of artistic representation.
The purpose of graphic design was to make people aware of the existence
of something, whether an event or a commercial product or anything else.
Otherwise it would be ignored as though it had truly never existed. Posters,
for example, borrowed the power of the sublime to inform people of their
subject’s existence, and in the process, that representation was occasionally
elevated into the domain of art.
But irrespective of capitalism and mass consumer society, didn’t art in
fact originally function as publicity? For example, a blazingly vibrant
sunflower in a flowerpot. A horse galloping across a prairie. A life of
loneliness. The tragedy of war. Hatred borne inside. Loving someone.
Being loved by no one . . . Couldn’t all artistic representation be thought of
in the final analysis as an advertisement for these?

With his eye on the time, Kido began to pick up his pace.
The work he saw showed a surprising diversity of form. From
illustrations, manga-style doodles, and tattoo-book-style renderings of
waterfalls and carp, to reproductions of famous paintings, surrealistic
watercolors, and a meticulously compiled chart of the toppings for the miso
soup served in jail at breakfast, lunch, and dinner—no two were alike.
While the skill level of the artists varied, some demonstrated obvious talent.
This, Kido supposed, was because the most creatively inclined death row
convicts had responded to the call for submissions.
Some of the pictures were almost alien to the space of the gallery.
Others were so beautiful and heartwarming, it was hard to believe they had
been conceived in prison. Among the work of convicts who acknowledged
their guilt, a few decried the brutality of capital punishment as an
institution, but many were depictions of birds, flowers, cats, or any other
subject the artist happened to have felt like taking up.
Although Kido had some reservations about fixating on the first idea
that came to him, he went on contemplating what the artists might be trying
to “advertise.” In spite of their claims of innocence, a surprisingly small
number directly denied committing the crime. Rather than say what they
had not done, they screamed with grave urgency that they were not the sort
of person that could have done it, defending not their actions but their
existence. The state was, after all, proceeding toward obliterating them.
Some of the convicts had drawn cute pictures that seemed incongruous
with the crimes they’d committed. In this, they sought to moor traces of
their existence to something external, something other than their soon-to-be
ruined bodies. In particular, to a side of themselves that no one would have
suspected they possessed, one scheduled for extermination along with the
rest of them when the appointed time came. If the human personality could
be carved up into parts, then perhaps they were desperately advertising, out
of the pit of fear for their own death, the presence of these blameless others
that would be dragged off with them to doom.

As it was nearly time for the talk to begin, Kido made his way through the
crowd along the display wall to view the last remaining pieces.
In the center of a frame crammed with rallying cries that might have
come from a political leaflet—“DOWN WITH THE SECURITY
TREATY!” “BANZAI TO THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE
PROLETARIAT!” and “NO SALES TAX INCREASE!”—was a series of
nude female illustrations in the style of a bordello flyer. At the sight of
these, Kido’s eyes boggled. The composition, the breast-accentuating poses,
everything about them was just like Omiura’s postcards—or rather, the
other way around: Omiura’s drawings were obvious imitations of these. The
display even included a hand-copied version of the Heart Sutra, a text
Omiura had asked Kido to procure for him.
Could he have seen this exhibition somehow? Kido wondered. Or an
article about it in a magazine . . . ? He recalled Omiura’s writing that he
was a “C-H-U-M-P.” Had that been an expression of his exasperation with
Kido for failing to notice that he had copied pictures by an inmate on death
row?
“So . . . Ahem. Can we have your attention please? As the talk will
begin shortly, we ask everyone to please take your seats. There will still be
time to view the displays afterward.”
As Kido began to follow the flow of the crowd toward his seat, he
took a glance at one last picture and stopped. Unlike the fraught imagery of
the other convicts’ pieces, this one depicted a serene landscape of hills and
fields with a stream running through. While poorly realized, it succeeded in
emanating a sense of modest simplicity. Beside it was a picture by the same
convict of small birds and cherry trees in full bloom, and another of a street
corner in an old town with a mailbox, utility poles, a road enclosed by plank
barriers.
Kido was overcome by the peculiar feeling that he had seen these
pictures somewhere before. But he didn’t see how he could have; they
looked like something a middle school student might make in art class.
Omiura, perhaps? No. Not him . . . So who then? The artist was described
as the perpetrator of murder and arson in Yokkaichi in 1985. As Kido had
been ten years old, his vague memories of the incident began to come back.
After racking his brain for an explanation for his reaction, he began to
suspect it was merely déjà vu and allowed the staff to usher him to his seat.
The talk consisted of an art critic involved in curating the exhibition
explaining the significance of each piece. As he made a forced attempt to
treat them exclusively as “works of art” in his analysis, Kido soon grew
bored. In his role as master of ceremonies, Sugino seemed to appreciate this
approach, and Kido resolved to set him straight later on.
All throughout, the landscapes continued to nag at Kido’s attention.
He found his gaze wandering to them past the heads of the crowd but was
still thinking about ducking out early rather than taking another look. Only
about fifteen minutes remained in the hour-long talk.
“. . . Now then, as we are running out of time, let’s take a quick look
over here, shall we?” said the critic. “See those racy pictures of nude
women? Those are the work of one of the perpetrators of the Insurance
Fraud Switcheroo Murder in Kitakyushu. This was a very convoluted case.
To describe it as simply as possible, it begins when A, the manager of a
karaoke bar in Kitakyushu, and B, one of his staff, who are both hard-up for
cash, cook up an insurance fraud scheme. First, the two of them are adopted
by a certain financial backer in order to legally become brothers. Then, they
have B take out an expensive life insurance plan, make A the recipient, and
kill a homeless man in B’s place by force-feeding him alcohol. Now they’re
ready for the switcheroo, and they try to fraudulently collect life insurance.
But here’s the slipup. The man they killed is not even close to B in either
age or height, and the police are onto them in no time. As it turns out, B has
already committed arson and a murder-robbery, so they slap him with the
death penalty. And here are his pictures . . .”
Kido had been listening without really taking it in, but when the
significance of the unofficial case name, Insurance Fraud Switcheroo
Murder, finally sunk in, his eyes snapped to the speaker.
To kill the homeless man in B’s place, they must have switched their
identities . . . At this thought, Kido broke out in ticklish goose bumps
around his biceps. When he made the connection to X impersonating
Daisuké Taniguchi, his jaw fell open, his lips shaped into an unvoiced
“Oh.” He remained frozen like that for several seconds, staring not at B’s
nude illustrations but at the landscapes beside them, until suddenly it hit
him where he had seen them before.
They’re just like X’s pictures, he realized. And pulling out his cell
phone, Kido searched for the photos of X’s personal effects that he had
taken at Rié’s place. Quickly he found several sketches. X’s work depicted
landscapes geographically distant from the ones here. And yet the style was
identical.
Kido’s heart pounded with urgency against the wall of his chest, trying
to tell him something. He took a deep breath and tried to think more
carefully how it might all fit together. The critic had just shifted to the
landscape pictures. He explained that the artist was a man named Kenkichi
Kobayashi who had been executed twenty years earlier. But X’s name was
supposed to be Yoshihiko Sonézaki.
How can I be so sure? thought Kido, knitting his brow and tilting his
head in perplexity. His sole justification was the names written on the
woman in Omiura’s enigmatic postcard. But just because the right breast
read “Daisuké Taniguchi” and the left “Yoshihiko Sonézaki,” did that
warrant the conclusion that those two men had switched family registers?
He pictured the text written in a circle around the nipples. Are your
eyes just empty holes, handsome lawyer sensei? C-H-U-M-P!
Why did he call me a chump in that letter? Kido wondered. Had
Omiura just been trying to rile him, or had he actually been hinting at
something substantial as Kido had assumed? Perhaps there was some
significance to his imitating the pictures of the man executed for the
insurance scam murder. If he had seen this exhibition, perhaps he was
familiar with the pictures by this Kenkichi Kobayashi that so resembled
X’s. Is that what he was trying to get at? But wasn’t Kobayashi long dead?
What was Omiura’s point?
Kido’s excitement faded as quickly as it had arisen, leaving him
grasping only an empty trace. The sound of applause alerted him that the
talk was over. Without any break, the Q&A began.

Most of the audience seemed sympathetic to the capital punishment

abolition movement. Many stated their opinions rather than asking
anything, and one woman got so worked up that her eyes grew moist. Of
the few with actual questions, most stuck to uncontroversial topics: the
challenges of organizing such an event, the speakers’ outlook for the future.
Everyone chose their words with excessive care.
“Yes, the gentleman at the front,” said Sugino, finally picking out a
man who’d had his hand up from the beginning. “We’re going to make this
the last question.”
“Thank you for the valuable talk,” said the man. “I’m also grateful for
the opportunity to speak. My name is Shuichi Kawamura. I’m a nonfiction
author writing a book about the families of victims of crime.”
Wearing a white shirt and navy-blue sweater, Kawamura looked to be
in his early twenties. While he came off as serious and spoke politely
enough, his voice sounded as though it was always on the verge of bursting
with emotion, which set the audience on edge. Kido had never heard of
him.
“Um . . . so this is going to sound a bit brash, but I think this
exhibition is intentionally misleading. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I’m
actually kind of ticked off. Before you held this event, how come you didn’t
exhibit the pictures of the victims? Why did you make no effort to
understand and relate to their feelings first? Before you went, ‘Wow, look
how talented these death row convicts are, look at their amazing pictures,’
did you bother to consider how much talent, what dreams, how beautiful
were the minds of those who were murdered? Were they given the time to
draw pictures before their lives were taken? You say that the death penalty
is barbaric, but don’t we all reap what we sow? Why are these people
privileged with the freedom to make art? However much they want to
express themselves, let’s not forget that they themselves deprived others of
the freedom to do the same. These murderers! Without considering any of
this, you look at the pictures here and think to yourselves, ‘Oh, those poor
convicts.’ Kind of one-sided, maybe? Shouldn’t you put up a sign that
properly describes how horrible their crimes actually were? Even in cases
of murder, it’s only, like, 0.2 percent that are sentenced to death, you know.
It is beyond clemency, what these people have done! Can you spare a
thought for the pain and suffering of not just those who died but their
surviving family and friends and loved ones? All exhibitions like this
achieve is to pour salt in their wounds! That’s all I have to say.”
Kawamura said all of this in a rush, trembling. When he was finished,
he plonked himself hard into his seat and held out the mic for the staff.
Piercing feedback ripped apart the silence of the gallery. One person in back
applauded vigorously, and several others looked over their shoulders to see
who it was. Then Kawamura jumped back up as though suddenly
remembering something he’d left out.
“Oh, and by the way, I think the execution of innocent people is a
serious problem and I’m opposed to it. That’s all I wanted to add.”
Saying this, he returned to his seat.
Prior to Kawamura’s tirade, it had been bothering Kido that no one
had even mentioned the victims. He thought the issue deserved a question
from the audience and was planning to tell Sugino later. In fact, this lacuna
in the abolition movement was part of the reason he wasn’t comfortable
becoming actively involved.
It seemed that Sugino was acquainted with Kawamura, because
without batting an eyelash, he nodded and gave his response.
“I think we need to draw a distinction between legally guaranteed
rights and our emotions. Legally speaking, Japan’s approach to punishment
is not absolute retributivism but proportional retributivism. The idea of lex
talionis embodied in the common expression ‘an eye for an eye’ is in fact a
precept for constraining retaliation, which tends be overly emotional, from
extending beyond the degree of the initial harm. In penology since the
advent of the modern era, corporal punishment that takes the form of ‘an
eye for an eye’ has been replaced with removal of freedom. If a victim is
blinded, the perpetrator does not have their eyes poked out. Even though the
victim is deprived of all the visual beauty of the world, the person who
inflicted this damage has no limitations placed on their sight. Instead of
such retribution, a punishment is assigned that restricts the criminal’s
freedom in accordance with the severity of the crime. This is punishment
meted out not through the body but through freedom. The institution of the
death penalty falls completely outside this principle. Emotionally speaking,
I can understand what you’re trying to say, but since the dead victim has
been deprived of all of their freedom, it follows from your reasoning that
death row convicts should never be allowed to think or feel anything.”
“Which exactly sums up my opinion,” said Kawamura, not using the
mic. “They should be executed immediately. Each and every second that
goes by until then is an extravagant luxury relative to those who’ve been
murdered.”
“The death penalty is a form of corporal punishment, and I’m opposed
to recognizing it as an exception. Moreover, artistic creation is one of the
most basic activities of human life, and I support the right of the
condemned to engage in it. That being said, I believe this is an issue for us
to resolve as a society and would be profoundly interested in an exhibit of
artwork created by the surviving family of the victims. Only I think the
onus is on advocates of the victims to hold it. Citizens should of course
view both and make up their minds for themselves.”
Kawamura repeatedly shook his head in adamant disagreement while
Sugino was speaking but argued with him no further, his back visibly tense
with unexpressed anger.
Sugino was rare in that he had turned away from a judge-track career
path, despite high hopes for him since his legal intern days and numerous
invitations, to instead become a lawyer. While his response was orthodox
from a legal history standpoint, Kido nonetheless felt he could understand
Kawamura’s frustration with his sheer impassiveness.

Once the talk was over, Sugino began to schmooze with the guest art critics,
so Kido decided to extricate himself from the crowd rushing out the door
and wait in front of the landscape paintings. According to the explanation
earlier, Kenkichi Kobayashi had murdered the married owners of a local
construction company, along with the sixth grader who was their only son.
But Kido, while fully acknowledging his own naivety, struggled to believe
that these landscapes could have been the work of such a person.
The gallery gradually began to empty out. Just as Kido started to look
up “Kenkichi Kobayashi” on his phone, Sugino appeared from the back.
 “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. “Thanks for listening to the
end.”
“Thanks for putting it on. I learned a lot tonight.”
As Kido went to put his phone in his pocket, his eye caught a
photograph of a face on the screen and all words abandoned him. It was X.
As Sugino seemed to think that Kido was checking his messages, he stood
there, waiting for Kido to finish with his phone. Kido skimmed the text
attached to the photo.
“See this . . . ,” he said, showing his iPhone to Sugino.
“Ah,” said Sugino, bringing his face closer to the display. “That’s the
man who painted these, Kenkichi Kobayashi.”
Kido looked back and forth between the photo on his screen and the
landscapes on display, puzzling over what this could possibly mean. He
realized the photo wasn’t X, only someone who looked incredibly similar.
How? Why? Suddenly he was ready to make a guess, but gobsmacked and
excited, he lacked the presence of mind to grasp any of the implications.
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

According to Sugino, Kenkichi Kobayashi had a son named Makoto. As the

boy had taken his mother’s maiden name, Hara, when she and Kenkichi got
divorced, he now went by the name Makoto Hara.
It was in 1985, in a city called Yokkaichi in Mie Prefecture, that
Kenkichi Kobayashi committed the crimes for which he was later executed.
A typical gambling addict, when Kobayashi inevitably slipped deep into
debt, he went begging at the house of an acquaintance who operated a
construction company, demanding money and going berserk when he was
refused. After a few hours back at home, he returned in the middle of the
night to rob the house, at which time he stabbed the acquaintance, his wife,
and his child to death with a kitchen knife before setting a fire to destroy the
evidence.
Kido could just barely remember this gruesome incident, but it gained
new immediacy when Sugino mentioned that Kobayashi’s son, Makoto, had
been born in 1975—the same year as Kido. Kido recalled vague
glimmerings of the faces of his classmates and of himself playing with
them. To think there had been another kid in grade four who’d had to cope
with the fallout of his father’s murders.
The story had been all over the news, bringing reporters in droves, and
Makoto’s mother had immediately moved out of town with him. Makoto
was later recorded as living in an orphanage in Maebashi. Little was known
about his activities after he left.
Then, in 2006, an unexpected turn of events brought Makoto Hara
back to public attention. Starting around this time, he was repeatedly
reported to the police for shoplifting. In 2008, he was finally charged and
given one year in prison with a three-year suspension of sentence. During
the probation period, he was then apprehended for shoplifting again,
slapped with one and a half years of actual jail time, and found guilty of the
same offense for a third time soon after his release. Now, after finally
serving out his term at the beginning of the year, he was living on the
outside again.
When Makoto Hara was sent to prison the first time around, one of the
weeklies published a feature exposé entitled “After the Crime” that used
him as an example of how a convict’s offspring could turn out. Kido had
been able to glean details of the exposé from extracts posted on a die-hard
crime-enthusiast website that he had found in the course of looking up
Kenkichi Kobayashi. Although the article made a show of protecting Hara’s
identity with a pseudonym, the fact that he went by his mother’s name had
already been outed by the site, every page of which was a jumble of sordid
hearsay. What surprised Kido most about the article was that Makoto Hara,
after leaving the orphanage, had reportedly belonged for a period of time to
a boxing club in Kita-Senju, had later debuted as a professional boxer, and
in 1997 had taken the bantamweight championship title in the East Japan
Rookie King Tournament. As Kido had some familiarity with combat
sports, he knew that this was no small feat.
But, as the feature went on to explain, Makoto had been grappling
with psychological problems and, before the All Japan Rookie King
Championship Match, suddenly withdrew from the bill and disappeared. He
then spent nearly a decade making ends meet as a day laborer, never staying
anywhere long as rumors that he was the child of a murderer inevitably
surfaced in his workplace wherever he went. The exposé noted that, after
his first conviction for shoplifting in 2006, the crime quickly became
habitual. It sympathized with Makoto Hara’s plight even while concluding
with cruel speculation about how criminal proclivities might be genetic.
As Sugino explained, the exposé was discovered soon after it was
published by a lawyer named Kadosaki, who was also involved in the
abolition movement. Dismayed at its treatment of the son of an infamous
convict, she’d taken Makoto Hara on as a client and represented him the
second time he was given an actual prison term. In court, she drew attention
to his early childhood trauma and history of psychiatric treatment in an
attempt to establish that his continuous shoplifting was the result of mental
illness, but none of this was taken into account in the sentencing. According
to Kadosaki, she had introduced him to a psychiatrist upon his release,
fearing his kleptomania would drive him to yet another repeat offense, and
now sometimes checked up on him.

After Sugino put him in touch with Kadosaki, Kido arranged to talk with
her on the phone. As he had been unable to find photographs of Makoto
Hara despite his best online search efforts, one of his first questions was
about Hara’s appearance, and Kadosaki told Kido that he bore no
resemblance to his father. When, in the natural course of their conversation,
he later asked where Hara had been serving his sentence, Kido was
flabbergasted at her response.
“Yokohama Prison,” she replied.
“What? Yokohama?”
“Yes. I guess that’s your neck of the woods?”
“It’s very close by. It’s just . . .”
Makoto Hara had been locked up with Omiura. There was nothing
peculiar about this in itself, given that Yokohama Prison was one of the few
jails in the Tokyo Correctional Precinct with accommodation blocks for B-
class convicts. Except it meant that Omiura and Hara had almost certainly
known each other as fellow inmates, which astonished him because it added
plausibility to a conjecture that he had been entertaining but still found too
unbelievable to be true. Namely, that X was the son of Kenkichi Kobayashi.
In other words, X was the real Makoto Hara, while the man formerly
incarcerated for compulsive shoplifting had merely switched family
registers with him via Omiura.
“What?” said Kadosaki when Kido pitched this to her on the phone.
She remained speechless for some time.
“If X is indeed the son of Kenkichi Kobayashi,” Kido continued, “then
I have an explanation for why he would feel it necessary to take on a new
past. It must have been tough for him . . . being descended from the man
who committed that awful crime.”
“Wait . . . What? Are you being serious about this?”
“A hundred percent.”
“I think you’re taking a logical leap here.”
 “Oh, OK . . . Well, I should mention that X is his spitting image—he
looks just like Kenkichi Kobayashi, I mean.”
“Is that all you’ve got?”
“Their art is also remarkably similar. That’s what drew the connection
for me. The idea that something like that might be hereditary.”
“Still a bit flimsy.”
“Does the Makoto Hara you had as a client ever talk about his father?”
“No. Never.”
“How about his days as a boxer?”
“It came up once or twice. I remember he laughed and said that all the
punches he took made him stupid.”
“How tall is he?”
“How tall . . . Um, I guess a little bit over 170 centimeters.”
“That’s pretty big . . . Is boxing an interest of yours, Kadosaki?”
“No. Not in the slightest.”
“The bantamweight category Makoto Hara competed in was for
boxers around fifty-two or fifty-three kilograms.”
“Wow . . . That’s even lighter than me . . .”
“X was around 163 centimeters tall. That’s another example. His
height matches up with the weight range.”
Kadosaki went silent again as she mulled this over.
“But Hara-san’s psychiatrist agreed that his kleptomania could stem
from boxing,” she said eventually. “Of course, I imagine his father was a
big part of it too.”
“The police never checked his identity? What about the photo on his
ID cards, his driver’s license?”
“I don’t think he has a license. He’s homeless.”
“Is that right . . .”
“He has a mild cognitive deficit. He blames boxing, says the brain
damage took away his ability to do math, but the psychiatrist thought he
was always like that.”
Both lawyers were silent for a moment.
“Fine,” she finally said. “Let’s assume this X was the real Makoto
Hara, and my client is someone else . . . Don’t you think that’s just terrible?
No matter how much you hate your past, there’s no excuse for tricking a
mentally handicapped drifter into swapping registers.”
 “I don’t see how it could have been a trick. Your client is aware that
Makoto Hara is the child of Kenkichi Kobayashi, is he not?”
“He’ll say yeah, but it’s hard to tell if he really understands. He replies
yeah to everything. Swindling someone like that just isn’t right.”
“. . . Could he have agreed for money?”
“Maybe, but I guarantee it wouldn’t have been a very large amount.”
“That could very well be.”

Kadosaki made a good point. While it was understandable that X might

have yearned for emancipation from the fact that he was the son of
Kenkichi Kobayashi, assuming that was indeed who he was, foisting that
fact on someone else was a dubious move at best. And if that someone
happened to have a slender capacity for decision-making, it was simply
atrocious.
The possibility that X might have done such a thing disrupted Kido’s
perception of him while simultaneously making it harder for Kido to
comprehend himself. Throughout his investigation, Kido had wanted X to
turn out to have been a decent person, whatever hardships might have
driven him to lie. Kido had, after all, taken on the investigation out of
sympathy for Rié and hated to think, after the tragedies she had endured,
that her late husband might have been a monster.
At the same time, Kido suspected that he envied and admired X for
being able to discard his past and start anew. Otherwise, there was no
satisfactory way to explain his interest in the man. Kido told himself that
this desire, the wish to experience the life of another, was not exclusive to
those who had lost all hope in the present. It was perfectly normal, an
inevitable response to the human predicament, to our entrapment within a
single, finite existence. If anything was unusual, it was following through
with this ubiquitous aspiration, which required a certain recklessness that
few possessed. For most, such a fresh beginning could only ever be a
dream. And while Kido’s Zainichi background allowed him to imagine and
relate to the many circumstances that might force people to hide their
identity, what ultimately sustained this dream for him was his conviction
that X had been someone worthy of the love of a woman like Rié.
 Initially, Kido had dismissed Kyoichi’s insistence that X had been a
dangerous criminal as delusional and only began to take it seriously after he
met Omiura, who’d forced him to accept that X and he might be not as
similar as he’d imagined. He was then able to put himself in X’s shoes
again when he began to believe that X was the son of Kenkichi Kobayashi.
For in this version of events, X was blameless, having suffered at the hands
of fate. Strange as it was, directing his compassion toward X’s ordeals had
brought Kido some modicum of relief from his own anxiety. Now, with
Kadosaki’s description of the drifter’s mental handicap, his faith in X had
been shaken once again, filling him with a vague sense of gloom. And in
his moments of clarity, Kido worried for his own sanity that he would react
this way.

Setting such problems aside, Kido’s inference was as follows.

The real name of the mentally handicapped man was, making use of
Omiura’s hint, Yoshihiko Sonézaki. This was the first man that Makoto
Hara exchanged family registers with. After living as “Yoshihiko Sonézaki”
for a while, Hara then crossed paths with Daisuké, with whom he
performed another swap—or perhaps Hara had taken Daisuké’s register
without his consent. Either way, Hara became “Daisuké Taniguchi” and
eventually met Rié in Town S, while the real Daisuké Taniguchi, assuming
he was still alive, went by the name “Yoshihiko Sonézaki.”
To check if he was right, Kido wanted to speak with the shoplifter who
called himself Makoto Hara and asked Kadosaki to arrange a meeting. As
the man was fond of Kadosaki, he quickly agreed.
When Kido and Kadosaki stepped into the appointed café beside
Higashi-Nakano Station, the man was already waiting at one of the tables.
The first thing Kido noticed was his age. While Makoto Hara’s family
register put him at the same age as Kido, this man looked to be in his fifties
or late forties at the youngest. Skinny, he kept his gray-speckled hair
buzzed, revealing the contours of a flat cranium that looked as though it
were being compressed by some kind of weight. With thin eyelids that
drooped heavily, the leftward bend of his features came together—if they
could be said to come together—in the tip of his small, off-kilter chin. Kido
took note of the sharp, narrow rise of his unbroken nose. The man’s face did
not in any way resemble that of a former boxer who had been clocked so
many times it had diminished his intelligence, as the man himself had
supposedly claimed.
“Hey, sensei!”
The man’s exuberance at the sight of Kadosaki was palpable. When he
approached, seeking a handshake, Kadosaki—a lawyer in her early thirties
and the very picture of normcore, from her haircut to her attire—
affectionately asked how he was doing. When she introduced him to Kido,
the man bowed respectfully and smiled with glee much like that he had
shown Kadosaki. Kido briefly explained who he was and, when the waitress
came with water, ordered a coffee. Although it was a weekday afternoon,
the café was crowded with middle-aged and elderly women. When they had
settled in at their table, Kido cut to the chase.
“Sonézaki-san . . . ,” he tried, testing the man’s reaction.
Remnants of the man’s smile lingered, but he looked confused.
“Do you know Yoshihiko Sonézaki?” Kido asked, trying a different
tack.
“Yeah.”
“How do you know him?”
“Yeah. I don’t know him.”
“Oh . . . So you’re not acquainted?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t mean to be rude but . . . is your real name Yoshihiko
Sonézaki?”
“I’m Makoto Hara. That’s definitely true.”
Beside Kido, Kadosaki seemed startled by the word “definitely.”
“Sorry, Hara-san,” she said in a nurturing tone. “I know it’s a weird
question to spring on you so suddenly. You must be very surprised.”
The man appeared upset and looked to her to rescue him, showing an
obvious dislike of Kido.
“This is about the husband of a woman that Kido-sensei is
representing,” Kadosaki began and briefly summarized the situation for
him. “. . . Then Kido-sensei thought, What if the man who died was Makoto
Hara?”
 “Apologies for being so blunt with you,” said Kido. “The wife of this
man is beside herself with anguish over the mystery of his identity. My aim
is to assist her in whatever way I can—I heard from someone that your real
name might in fact be Yoshihiko Sonézaki. So, while I knew it would be
very impolite of me to ask you, I felt that I simply had to.”
The man poured large quantities of milk and sugar into his coffee,
pinched the handle of his cup, and circled his eyes from left to right, his
mouth agape, saying nothing.
He’s not Makoto Hara after all, thought Kido. He was beginning to
feel certain of this, when it occurred to him that Omiura might be
intimidating the man into holding his tongue.
“OK. Let me ask you something else,” said Kido. “Are you acquainted
with Norio Omiura?”
“Yeah.”
“So you know him?” Kido asked.
“Yeah,” the man repeated, this time more resolutely.
“Did Omiura set up the exchange of your family register?”
The man looked to Kadosaki, silently asking her whether to swallow
down the words stuck in his throat or pull them out.
“You can tell us,” she said. “It will make it easier for me to help you.
Is your name actually Makoto Hara?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright, so what’s the name you were given at birth?”
“Um . . . Will I have to go to jail again?”
“I promise that I will never repeat what you tell me here,” said Kido,
looking him straight in the eye.
The man hesitated before blurting, “My name is really Shozo
Tashiro.”
Kido frowned and could sense Kadosaki’s breath catching beside him.
“That’s your real name?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“And you traded it with Makoto Hara?”
“Yeah. You got it. My family register, everything.”
“Why would you do that? For money?”
“Yeah. Also, finding jobs and borrowing money and that is hard when
you’re homeless.”
 “Is that what they told you?”
“Yeah.”
“And then you traded your family register with Makoto Hara.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you know what kind of person Makoto Hara was?”
“Yeah.”
“Did Makoto Hara tell you?”
“Yeah. The middleman did.”
“You never met Makoto Hara himself?”
“Yeah. I met him.”
“So you’re telling us your name is Tashiro? Not Sonézaki?”
“Yeah. I don’t know who that is,” said the man who had reclaimed
Tashiro as his name with a decisive shake of his head.
Kido had the sense he wasn’t lying. He took out a photo of X.
“Is this the Makoto Hara you swapped family registers with?” he
asked.
“Yeah. It’s not him,” Tashiro declared, leaving no room for
equivocation, as though his self-respect depended on it. “I don’t know this
guy!”

After this, the three of them had cake while Kido asked Tashiro what his
life had been like. Tashiro told them that, after graduating from high school,
he had moved from job to job. He never lasted long because people would
always call him terrible names like “moron” and “waste of space,” and for
the past ten years he had been homeless. The sum he’d received for the
family register swap after Omiura took his cut had been barely enough to
cover food for a month. Tashiro said he didn’t know how much Makoto
Hara had paid.
When Kido asked whether he had ever worried that becoming the
child of Kenkichi Kobayashi might make his life more difficult, despite
what Omiura had told him, Tashiro replied, “Yeah. But I never tell people
about it and they don’t link Hara to Kenkichi. We have different family
names.”
 In total, the meeting lasted about an hour and a half. When they left
and it was just Kido and Kadosaki, she was still struggling to find words.
“All the things I did to support him . . . what was that? His name’s not
Hara—it’s Tashiro? He never wanted to talk about what happened when he
was a child. But I just thought that was natural. It didn’t seem right to press
him about it.”
“That’s perfectly understandable.”
“I always thought his kleptomania was from the strains of boxing and
the incident with his father and . . . The way he presented himself, he fit the
part perfectly. Every time I looked at those little creases on the side of his
eyes, I would think of all the trials and tribulations he had been through as
the child of a murderer and my heart would go out to him.”
“Yes . . . Well, I doubt his past was exactly uneventful. One can see
the isolation and sadness in his face.”
As Kido tried to console Kadosaki, he thought of X’s impassioned
telling of Daisuké Taniguchi’s tale as though the pain were his own.

Although Kido felt certain that Omiura would continue to ignore him, he
tried requesting another visit. If he was going to elicit a response this time,
he decided that his letter would need a hook.
“After our last meeting, I did a lot of research of my own,” Kido
wrote. “Now I finally understand what you were trying to convey with
those postcards.”
A reply came from Omiura immediately. It was a letter
unaccompanied by any illustration. He would be glad to have Kido visit
whenever he liked.
Kido would have been unfazed by such a change of heart from any
other inmate, as most were eager for contact with the outside world. But
because it was Omiura, the reply struck him as peculiar.
On December 29, Kido went to meet him in Yokohama Prison. It was
a snowless but wintry day, the sky overcast with a chill wind blowing, and
Kido found himself walking faster than usual, his dress shoes clapping dry
and hard on the asphalt walkway. The firm had gone on break the previous
day, and the crowds on the trains were waning. As Kido had never visited
prison during the Shogatsu holidays, his heart filled with a sort of tender
sentimentality, the end-of-year calm piling on the weight of the year with
unfaltering melancholy.
The moment Omiura stepped into the visiting room, he pointed his
chin at Kido, one eye stretched wide, and said, “Hey, Korean lawyer. Long
time no see!”
At this, the tension dropped from Kido’s cheeks.
“It’s been a while,” he replied with a nod.
Despite the fact that Omiura’s attitude had stirred such fierce hatred in
Kido before, for some reason, this time, it brought only the slightest
annoyance. Kido felt no fondness toward the man, and Omiura showed no
more deference than before. Nevertheless, something in that moment made
Kido smile.
“You’re looking good,” said Kido.
“Don’t mess with me,” said Omiura. “I’m holding on for dear life.”
“I met with Makoto Hara.”
At these words, Omiura momentarily pursed his lips and homed in on
Kido with a single eye. “Is that right?” he said. “He was in here till
recently.”
“Were you his middleman too?”
“For what?”
Kido waited silently for him to say more.
“OK. I don’t know what he told you, but I’ve got nothing to do with
it.”
“He’s actually a different person, isn’t he?”
“Who is?”
Kido ignored this obvious attempt to play dumb. “The real Makoto
Hara had no compunctions about dumping his past on him?”
Hearing this, Omiura sucked his cheeks in with surprise and gave
Kido a sly smile. “You still don’t understand a thing, do you, sensei?”
“Why would you say that?”
Omiura cast his gaze down with a smirk as though the situation was
too funny for him. Kido had been worried about the corrections officer
recording their conversation in the log but now realized there was no need.
The man’s professional and utterly imperturbable boredom made him aloof
and distant from all manner of hassle. Although their exchange ought to
have triggered his suspicion, his hand was barely moving.
“OK. Fine. Maybe you’re right,” said Kido. “I learned the real name
of the man who used to be in here, but in the process, I’ve become confused
about who Yoshihiko Sonézaki is. You wrote in the letter . . .”
Indifferent to Kido’s frank admission, Omiura seemed to find their
conversation so tedious that he was about to get up and walk away.
“Sensei, you’ve really put your stupidity on parade here,” he said.
“Don’t you feel ashamed to exist?”
All Kido could manage was a bitter smile. Even this reaction seemed
to annoy Omiura, and he spent the next while viciously mocking the content
of all Kido’s letters as if to thoroughly pulverize his self-respect. The
corrections officer finally took interest and observed the abuse in
fascination, looking not at Omiura but Kido. Omiura’s invective raised
Kido’s ire and hurt his feelings, but something told him it was an attempt to
psychologically prime him for manipulation, and he tried not to let it get to
him.
“You look down on me even though you’re Korean, don’t you? You
never believed a word I said from day one because in your eyes I’m nothing
but a con artist. How can you think I’m a bigot when it’s you who’s
discriminating?”
Kido came close to saying that he wasn’t discriminating because
Omiura was an actual con artist doing actual time for it, but took his point
about how he’d looked down on him and couldn’t bring himself to make the
retort. Then he became aware of how Omiura’s mishmash of justified
claims and specious distractions was affecting him and took note of the
authority the man seized as he came into his element, cunningly deploying
words to gain a foothold on the threshold of his listener’s mind and make
whatever inroads he could. If they had been having this conversation
somewhere else, like a restaurant or a café, Kido might have swallowed
every word. He couldn’t help shuddering at the thought.
“You want me to tell you the biggest reason you’re a dumbass?”
“What’s that?”
“I bet you think I turned out like this because they made me appear in
that gay porno.”
 “I wouldn’t go that far. But I did take that anecdote to be something I
was supposed to view quite seriously because of how strongly you
emphasized it, even though we’d only just met.”
“You look down on me for being a pathetic con man, and you still
think that story I fed you was true?”
Kido said nothing.
“Now you know why I call you a chump.” Omiura slowly brought his
face up to the partition, bearing in on Kido as though he were now beneath
dignity.
“How do you even know my name is Norio Omiura? Is it because I
look like a ‘Norio Omiura’?”
Speechless, Kido could only return his gaze.
“It’s the same with tattoo artists. They don’t just tattoo other people.
First, they tattoo themselves. With all the family registers being flipped,
why would you think I was an exception? Moron.”
“. . . Are you actually someone else too?”
Omiura laughed sneeringly. When the corrections officer told them
their time was up, he left Kido with these words:
“Listen, Korean lawyer. I feel sorry for you, so I’m going to let you in
on one thing. The man you’re trying so hard to figure out is just a boring
schmuck. You seem to have some weird expectations about him, but the
children of killers are nothing much. You’ve got your own family, don’t
you? As the saying goes, beware the snake in tall grass. If I were you, I’d
leave it alone.”
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

At night on New Year’s Day, Kido lay in the dark on a futon, thinking back
on the past two days.
They were at his family home in Kanazawa. He, Kaori, and Sota had
arrived there that morning after spending New Year’s Eve at the home of
his in-laws in Yokohama—a pattern they repeated annually. On the surface,
it had been a perfectly ordinary Shogatsu holiday. Kaori had relaxed with
her brother and parents at her family home and engaged genially with
Kido’s parents at his. Around both dinner tables, Kido had smiled and
conversed naturally with her, and after retreating to their rooms, they had
spread their futons on the floor and discussed practical matters such as their
plans for the following day.
But unlike the years before, Kido found himself unable to sleep, both
the previous night in Yokohama and now here in Kanazawa. It was too
stimulating to have Sota and Kaori stretched out on each side of him on
their futons, as he had grown accustomed to the routine of one of them
putting the boy to sleep and then being alone until morning.
He dreaded the thought of explaining the situation to their parents if he
and Kaori decided to divorce. A custody battle would no doubt ensue, and
while, on the one hand, he never intended to simply give up his son, on the
other, he knew he would feel bad to take Sota from her. At the firm, they
had often discussed the ramifications of introducing joint custody to Japan,
but that was a long way off, if it ever even happened. As Sota’s
grandparents all loved him deeply, Kido could anticipate his guilt toward
whichever side lost. And he was all too aware that if the question were put
to Sota, he would surely choose his mother, however much he seemed to
favor Kido under the present circumstances.
 The whole scenario reeked of savagery, and as Kido stared at the
ceiling in the dark, painfully aware of his wife doing the same beside him,
he told himself that their relationship was not so far gone as to force such an
extreme decision just yet.

Ever since Kido had learned of the boxing club Makoto Hara had belonged
to, his curiosity had been piqued. So in the new year, once the busy period
at work had settled, he took the train to Kita-Senju in the northeastern
corner of Tokyo for a visit.
Kido had been watching live televised broadcasts of world
championship boxing since he was a child, and after the combat sports
boom kicked off in the late nineties, he had become more interested in the
technical side, turning for a while into an avid viewer of big fights streamed
online. Nevertheless, this represented his first time going to an actual club.
And, as he stepped out of the station beneath the winter sky and began to
walk along a stretch of local shops known as Showakai, he recalled not
actual boxing, but the boxing manga that he used to love as a boy, like
Champion Joe and Genki, the Boy Champ.
Presently he reached a narrow residential street. There were so few
passersby that the streetlights made him think of people hunched over their
cell phones as they waited for a friend running late. It did not strike him as
the sort of place likely to have a boxing club, and he had to check his map
repeatedly to convince himself he was going the right way. But soon
enough, he spotted what appeared to be the right sign and building.

The moment Kido slid open the glass door, three young people, one
warming up in the ring and two on the floor, glanced at him and called out
“President!” in the direction of the office at the back. The man that stepped
out looked to be about fifty and wore a black training suit. It was the club
president, Kosuge, with whom Kido had been communicating by email.
When Kido had initially requested a meeting to talk about Makoto
Hara, Kosuge had replied swiftly and been all too eager to comply, saying
that he “remembered him well” and that he was shocked to hear he had
died. After Kido explained that Hara’s widow wanted to know what sort of
person he had been, Kosuge agreed to reach out to his old practice buddies.
Now, at Kido’s greeting, he gave him a ruddy-faced smile.
Kido knew that the building that housed the club had originally been a
meat-packing plant. Fluorescent lights hung haphazardly from the high
ceiling. There did not seem to be enough of them to cover the floor area, as
the room was somewhat dim even though it was uncomfortably bright to
look up.
Kido passed between a number of dangling black-and-red punching
bags as he followed Kosuge to the back. Techno music pounded, punctuated
every three minutes by the sound of a buzzer. Posters of classic fights such
as Mike Tyson versus Evander Holyfield and showcase matches organized
by the club plastered the walls in every direction. The exception was one
section adorned with the championship belts of those who had trained there,
alongside the memorial photo of the club’s founder, his motivational advice,
daily training protocol. To Kido, it was all strange and fascinating.
Waiting in the office was an ex-professional boxer who was said to be
a few years older than Makoto Hara and to have trained with him in the
past. He introduced himself as Yanagisawa and handed Kido a business
card for a fishing gear shop in the Kinshicho area, which occupied his time
now that he was retired from the sport.
Kido briefly rehashed the series of events that had led up to their
meeting, which he had already described by email, and showed them a
picture of X.
“Is this man Makoto Hara?” he asked.
Both Kosuge and Yanagisawa took one glance at it and nodded.
“That’s Makoto alright,” said Kosuge.
“Are you certain?”
“Without a doubt. We dug up some old pictures for you—that’s him,
right?”
Kosuge showed Kido a photo of Makoto Hara, wearing red boxing
gloves and taking a fighting pose. Although he had been much leaner back
then, there was no mistaking that it was X.
I’ve finally done it, thought Kido as he studied the image, speechless
for some time. A shiver began around his shoulders and ran repeatedly
down his back, spreading also to his arms and legs, as though it could find
nowhere else to go. His intuition at the convict art exhibition that X was the
son of Kenkichi Kobayashi seemed to have presaged this moment. If that
hunch had turned out to be off the mark, he would have had little recourse
but to sigh at his failure. Now he savored the uncanny discovery that it had
been correct, slipping into a daze.
“How did Makoto die?” Kosuge asked when Kido’s silence had
stretched out to an awkward length. This brought Kido back to his senses,
and he looked up at Kosuge.
“He worked in forestry and was involved in an accident at a logging
site,” Kido replied, and explained what had happened, leaving out any
sensitive details.
Kosuge listened with his arms crossed and his mouth half open.
Yanagisawa nodded along attentively, wrinkling his chin like the pit of a
pickled plum. From their reactions, Kido could tell that they knew about
Makoto Hara’s troubled youth.
“When did he start coming to this club, approximately?”
“The spring of ’95,” said Kosuge. “I remember it well because it was
after the Kobe earthquake and the Aum terrorist attack.”
“Oh . . .” Kido recalled his horror when, only a few short months after
the disaster in Kobe, he had seen the news of the Aum Shinrikyo cult
releasing sarin gas in the Tokyo subways. “In that awful year.”
“When Makoto first showed up, weren’t some people saying he was
an Aum runaway?” said Yanagisawa with a laugh.
“Only because Makoto never said a word about himself to anyone,”
Kosuge hurried to explain when he saw Kido looking perplexed. “You gotta
understand, he had this look in his eyes, and there was something about him
that told you he’d been through some stuff, you know. Plus, he was a
sensitive kid that mostly kept to himself but with this power and
determination at his core.”
“As far as I can tell from his photos, his eyes look gentle to me.”
“From the one you just showed us, I get the feeling he mellowed out
after he was here. Do you think he was happy with that woman?”
“Yes. That seems to have been the case,” said Kido, meaning it
sincerely.
 “Remember, this was in his boxing days,” said Kosuge, gesturing
toward the old photo of Makoto Hara.
Kido took another look. If he focused only on his eyes, Hara did
indeed seem like a different person.
“Anyhow, he was a real nice kid. And I’m not saying his eyes were
ferocious or anything like that. More like, how can I put it . . .”
“They picked up on all sorts of things,” Kido supplied.
“You got it. The man was perceptive. You see, boxing is the kind of
sport where you’ve got an opponent, so it’s all about your attitude when
you’re face-to-face with someone just like we are right now. That’s how
you can tell if someone’s got the knack.”
“Huh. Is that right?” said Kido. Then after a pause, “Why do you think
he took up boxing? Was he aiming to become a pro from the beginning?”
“It was just a whim for him at first. I was standing right there at the
entrance to this office, observing the training, when he stepped into the club
out of the blue. I remember it well, that moment.”
Kido recalled Rié’s story of when Makoto Hara first appeared at the
stationery shop in a similarly sudden way, and in his mind’s eye, the two
scenes melded into one. Perhaps that had been Hara’s furtive way of
interacting with different fragments of the world.
“And over time, I guess he started to show promise?”
“You got it. You got it. Kid didn’t know a thing about boxing, but his
reflexes were solid and he was a fast learner. Plus, he threw himself into the
training like it was the only thing he had. That’s what it comes down to in
the end.”
Kosuge stuck out his thumb and tapped it several times against his
chest. In doing so, he had made a loose fist and Kido sensed the power in its
sinewy contours, so unlike that of a nonboxer.
“Makoto came to the idea himself and I told him to go for it—I mean
take the test to be certified as a pro. Yanagisawa here was working hard
toward the same goal.”
“Is it uncommon to aim for the professional level?”
“It sure is these days. Take this club here. Pretty much all our eighty or
so members are amateurs. I’m including, for example, women’s boxercise.
It’s tough to pay the bills as a pro. That’s for sure. Plus, nowadays people
who are serious about boxing can just look up clubs online and take their
pick. Where do you suppose that leaves a little club in a working-class
neighborhood like this one?”
“I see . . . How much money is in it? Sorry, I’m just curious.”
“The sign-up fee here is ¥10,000. Association rules fix the monthly
fee at no more than ¥12,000. Then on top of that, you’ve got to get
mouthpieces made, buy gloves, and other little expenses like that. It’s not as
bad as other sports though because you compete without clothes.”
“I think he was asking how much money boxers make,” Yanagisawa
interjected, looking at Kido with an apologetic smile.
When Kosuge just stared back in confusion, Yanagisawa answered on
his behalf.
“Pros fight about three times a year, give or take. The fight money you
take home for a four-round match is about ¥60,000, and then ¥100,000 for a
six-rounder. Good luck putting food on the table that way. And for someone
like Makoto with no one to depend on, it’s just impossible ’cause they don’t
pay you in cash, just tickets to the matches that you have to sell yourself.”
“So everyone is moonlighting on the side?”
“You got it,” replied Kosuge. “Usually at bars and restaurants. Makoto
worked at a Chinese joint.”
Kido had decided it wasn’t necessary to record their conversation, but
he took notes on what he had heard thus far.
“Do you need to show some form of identification when you take the
professional certification test?”
“Not when you take the test, but when they issue the license, you need
either a family register or a residence certificate.”
As Kosuge was speaking, he looked over his shoulder to check on a
trainee who was shadowboxing in the ring. Kido followed his gaze to a
young man of around twenty with hair parted down the middle. All alone in
the squarish space, he launched punch after punch at the person meant to be
there. As if to dodge this person’s incoming jabs, the man moved his feet
constantly, his upper body swaying left to right. The fruit of his efforts
would be revealed in the flesh of an as-yet-unseen opponent; the young man
was isolated from that future by the cage of the present. Suddenly, Kido
imagined Makoto Hara in this run-down gym doing the same lonely
exercise day after day.
 “Oh, sorry,” said Kosuge when he looked back, and Kido took
advantage of this disruption to broach the topic he most wanted to ask
about.
“Are you aware who Hara-san’s father was?”
Kosuge exchanged a glance with Yanagisawa. “Yeah,” he said. “We
heard.”
“When did he tell you?”
“So, when Makoto was about to debut in a pro-level fight, he came to
me for advice. Told me he was thinking of giving himself a ring name. I
said go for it. Boxing is pretty dull entertainment compared to, say,
kickboxing or MMA. You’ve got to become the kind of fighter that draws
crowds. So I suggested he come up with a crazy ring name, one that would
really stand out. But Makoto disagreed. Said he wanted something run-of-
the-mill so he could blend in.”
“Did he explain why?”
“He wouldn’t say at the time. I heard the reason from him later. After
he became the rookie king of east Japan.”
“I see.”
“Boy oh boy . . . I was as shocked as anybody. But I tried to encourage
him. Said, look, you can’t confuse a parent with their kid. They’re not the
same. It’s your life to lead, so just give it your all and let’s go for the gold.”
“Is this when he told you about his past?”
“You got it . . . Makoto said that, after the incident, him and his mom
stayed with his aunt and uncle for a while. They were kind to them at first,
till his uncle got fed up with the situation. His aunt was his mom’s younger
sister, and she got caught between Makoto’s mom and her husband, slipped
into a kind of depression. Then they had to leave.”
“How awful . . .”
“After that, Makoto’s mother ditched him and he ended up in an
orphanage till he graduated middle school. Sounds like school was tough as
hell too, getting bullied and all the rest of it.”
“But hadn’t he already changed his name from Kobayashi to Hara?”
“He told me that the first school he transferred to was pretty close by,
so they figured out who he was lickety-split. You gotta remember that
Makoto’s old man killed a boy not much older than Makoto himself. It was
the boy’s friends who really hated him. Blamed him for what his old man
did. No one knew who he was at the middle school after the orphanage, but
he’d already turned into an introvert, and got bullied basically just for that.”
“He never went to high school?”
“He told me he enrolled in night school but dropped out almost
immediately. Then he left the orphanage and, during the two, three years
before he came here, lived as sort of a vagrant. He never got into the details.
I bet it was tough as a minor. No residence certificate, thrown out there all
by yourself, the poor kid.”
“Kenkichi Kobayashi was executed in 1993, when Hara-san was
eighteen. Is that the period when he was homeless?”
“Makoto had a grudge against his old man like you wouldn’t believe.
He was a quiet kid, but when he got going about his father, asking why he
had to be born to such a monster, he’d start shaking and this eerie look
would come over him like he was possessed. Eyes turned so sharp they
bored right into you . . . He told me he was friends with the boy that got
killed. That was one thing he could never get over.”
“Did he ever visit his father in jail?”
“Nope. Never went to meet him that I’m aware. He’d get letters,
though. Makoto said they were full of all this stuff about how guilty his old
man felt and how much he regretted everything, but that when you got right
down to it, it was really just about his own suffering, and his apologies to
the victims rang hollow. Apparently, he begged Makoto not to forget the
happy memories they had together.”
Kido sighed as he recalled the serene landscapes Kobayashi had
painted in jail. “Had he been a good father to Hara-san? Before, I mean.”
“Beats me. Going through something like that is bound to change the
way you look back on things . . . But one thing’s for sure—Makoto never
said that he wished his old man could have lived. I couldn’t tell you how he
felt on the inside.”
“No . . . I suppose there isn’t any way to know.”
“It was about two years after his father was executed that he showed
up here. Said he saw normal kids his age going to university and starting
careers and felt like he should find some purpose of his own . . .”
Kido nodded to indicate that he could relate.
Kosuge turned to the ring again and said, “Excuse me a sec. That
alright? I won’t be long. In the meantime, ask Yanagisawa whatever you
like. Also, if you’re interested, feel free to take a look around.”
Kido was in no position to insist that Kosuge stay, and stood up to
give him a bow as he abruptly left the office. The air-conditioning had been
going on and off fitfully, and when Kido returned to his seat he felt chill air
around his feet. He realized now that more than an hour had already passed.
Yanagisawa remained in the office with Kido. After briefly watching
Kosuge take shots to punch mitts in the ring, he narrowed his eyes slightly
and said, “Kosuge gave Makoto a sermon once. Yup.”
Kido turned to face Yanagisawa. “A sermon?” he said, in a casual tone
of the sort he might have used with someone close to his age.
“Makoto was a talented guy. I couldn’t tell you if he had what it takes
to be champ, but he was way better than me. Good thing he was in a
different weight class or we might never have been so tight.”
“I suppose not.”
“Makoto passed the pro test on his first try. Everything up to then was
smooth sailing. Then he won the East Japan Rookie King Tournament, and
suddenly he was the center of attention. Even more than usual ’cause he
KO’d the guy in his title fight. This was before the internet, so it was only
some people that knew about him, of course. But that didn’t change
anything for Makoto, and when he was set to fight for the All Japan Rookie
King Championship, he told Kosuge he wanted to pull out. Yup. Asked for
my advice too.”
“I see. What ring name did he choose in the end?”
“Katsutoshi Ogata. You write ‘Katsutoshi’ with the kanji for ‘win,’
like this, see . . .” Yanagisawa used the tip of his finger to air-write two
ideograms that together meant “win” and could be pronounced
“katsutoshi.” “Me and him closed our eyes, flipped the phonebook to a
random page, and there it was.”
“That’s how he picked his ring name?” asked Kido with a bemused
smile.
“You better believe it. He thought a name that meant ‘win’ was good
luck. Regretted it later, though.”
“Why was that?”
“You know how when a boxer wins they write ‘win’ beside your name
in the newspaper and everything? Well, that meant for him it was ‘win win.’
Everyone that saw it thought it was hilarious.”
 Although the investigation into Makoto Hara had absorbed Kido’s
thoughts for more than a year now, this was the first time that he imagined
him smiling before he met Rié. And suddenly, what had until then been an
empty shell of records and anecdotes seemed to pulse with vitality.
“Did Hara-san smile often?”
“Nope, not really. He wasn’t a downer or anything like that, just not
much of a talker. That’s why he looks like a different person in that picture
with his wife. He’s aged a bit, but it’s the gentle expression on his face that
does it. It’s good to see him like that.”
“I know what you mean.”
“And . . . What was I talking about again? Oh yeah, right, right. So the
prez—you know I mean Kosuge, right?—the prez, he asked Makoto why he
wanted to pull out of the rookie king title fight. And that was the first time
Makoto talked about his father.”
“Had someone in the boxing world recognized him?”
“Nope . . . He wasn’t worried so much about being outed. It was more
about whether he deserved the glory.”
“Oh . . .”
“The poor guy. He took up boxing ’cause he was sick of being an
outsider, but when his moment to shine finally came . . . I think he was
scared of taking flack for who he was. No doubt. But it was more than that.
There was his friend that got killed too. He felt like he owed him
something.”
“. . . I understand.”
“Makoto was, let’s say . . . Well, you ever heard of gender identity
disorder? You know where your body and mind just don’t match up? For
Makoto it was something like that. Yup. Like someone’s stuffed you into
this disgusting mascot suit and you’re stuck in there for your whole life.”
“By that you’re referring to Hara-san being seen by others as the child
of a death row convict?”
“Well, that’s part of it. But, you know, he used to talk about his body.
Yup. They’re basically mirror images of each other, him and his father, I
mean.”
“Oh, yes . . . That’s right.”
“He said it grossed him out so bad to think that his father’s blood ran
in his veins that he wanted to scratch himself open and scrape his own body
off. You could never make love to someone if you saw your body like that,
now could you? That’s how come he was still a virgin, back when he was
here.”
Not knowing what to say, Kido lowered his head and nodded several
times. This brought his arms and legs into view, and he began to study
them. He tried to imagine the agony of perceiving what was supposed to be
each person’s last refuge, the body, as hell, and to believe that you were
therefore unqualified to love and be loved.
“You know how people are always saying, ‘Oh, you look more like
your father’ or ‘You look more like your mother.’ Makoto couldn’t have
that conversation. ’Cause saying he resembled his father was the same as
saying he didn’t deserve to exist . . . His body and mind just didn’t mesh.
He was terrified that his body might go berserk and slip out of his control.
That’s what his bullies used to tell him would happen. A normal person
would never make a move to actually kill someone, no matter how angry
they were. But Makoto was terrified that he might. Hurting his body was his
way of coping. Unless he took punches and punished himself through
training, he was just miserable. He told me that boxing was supposed to
teach him how to master his violent impulses.”
“That was his motivation?”
“According to him anyway. I tried to help him get over it, asked him
who’d ever heard of a murderer that had a parent who was a murderer too.
But I guess all the bullying really did a number on him. I get that—I was
bullied too. When someone’s beating you up every day, the only way to
accept that reality is to think of yourself as the one who’s doing the beating,
or, like, tell yourself that getting beaten is inevitable, that you’re powerless
to do anything about it.”
“Huh . . . I can think of situations where people use pain and self-harm
to cope with self-negating emotions. It happens with teenagers, for
example.”
“For sure. But I don’t think the prez, Kosuge—I don’t think he
understood where Makoto was coming from. He thought that Makoto was
putting himself through the wringer to make up for his father’s sins and told
him straight up how crazy that was. As if any amount of suffering was
going to bring the victims back to life. And how was showing off his pain to
everyone any different than the shit-eating nonsense in his father’s letters?
But Makoto never meant it that way. At least I don’t think so. To be fair to
the prez, he was really worried about Makoto, and it ticked him off that he
would think of backing down at the last minute after they’d come so far, so
I don’t think there was any other way he could have reacted. In the end, he
gave him some advice. Said, look, your life is your own to lead, so if you’re
really so torn up about it, why don’t you go and speak with the surviving
family. Yup. Then it won’t matter what anyone else says. So long as the
family approves of what you’ve decided to do with your life, you can keep
on going and hold your head high.”
Kido looked toward Kosuge in the ring, keeping his gaze unfocused.
He recalled that the murdered president of the construction company had
had surviving parents and a younger brother.
“Oh Makoto, the poor guy,” said Yanagisawa, looking troubled and
wistful.
“Back then, me and him used to go running together in the morning,
around this area,” he said after a time. “One day, when it was getting to the
point where he had to make a decision about the fight, I invited him to
come out for a run, do some roadwork. So we’re ripping along as usual till
we get to the local park, when suddenly he starts slipping behind. I look
back, like what the heck, and I see he’s just stopped . . . Then he falls to his
knees like all the strength has gone out of him and, when I go over and ask
if he’s alright, he drops flat onto his belly and starts to cry. Right in the
middle of this big park. Rubbing his face into the dirt and just wailing. On
that chilly morning. Cold enough for frost.”
“Oh my . . .” Kido felt his chest tighten as he imagined the scene. He
was fairly certain he’d passed that very park on his way over from the
station.
“That’s when I told him he didn’t have to do it. Whatever the prez
said, he had no obligation to speak with the victims’ family . . . He’d just
make them uncomfortable anyway.”
Saying nothing, Kido gave him a frown of concern. Then after a
pause, he asked, “Did he end up going?”
“Nope, never did—or, well . . . it was right after that he got himself
into an accident.”
“An accident?”
 “He fell off a balcony. From the sixth floor of his apartment building.
Got badly injured. Broke a bunch of different bones. Only thing that saved
him was landing on the roof of the bicycle parking lot.”
“Was it . . .” Kido left the sentence unfinished.
“Makoto claimed it was unintentional,” said Yanagisawa, guessing his
meaning. “But said he couldn’t remember what happened. Yup . . .
Obviously, a full-grown man doesn’t just fall off a balcony by mistake. I
mean, there was a railing . . . But personally, I don’t think he wanted to die.
He was just at his wit’s end and needed some way to escape from it all. The
injury forced him to forfeit the rookie king fight. To me, he looked kind of
relieved.”
“What was Kosuge’s reaction?”
“He was as shocked as the rest of us. It had been ages since the club
churned out a pro. Makoto apologized, but once he got out of the hospital,
he just vanished. The prez really beat himself up over it. He’s back to his
old self now, but for a long time he was in the pits. You saw the way he
rushed off just now? I think it’s painful for him to remember.”
Kido looked at Kosuge again and felt sorry for him.
“The prez would have done anything to make Makoto champ. He
wanted to help him turn his life around and move past all the suffering he’d
been through. Then he’d have confidence, you know?”
“Yes.”
“But Makoto didn’t want to be champ. He just wanted to be a normal
person . . . He just wanted to live a normal, quiet life. A boring life that no
one would take notice of. That was his deepest, truest desire. Same time, he
was torn ’cause he knew how hard the prez was trying to help him become
champ.”
After Kido wrote the words “normal person” in his notebook, he
stared quietly at them for a while. He accepted the intense longing Hara had
imbued this phrase with, dismissing the clichéd counterarguments that
hounded the very idea of normal. These did not apply to someone who had
lived such a troubled life. When at last he had stared so long at the word
“normal” that it lost all meaning for him, Kido put another question to
Yanagisawa.
“And that’s the last time you saw Hara-san?”
“That’s right.”
 “When would that have been?”
“Nineteen—um—ninety-eight, I guess.”
“And you’ve heard no news of him since?”
“Nothing.”
Kido gave a nod to shake his thoughts into order and began filling in
his patchy notes. Only nine years of Makoto’s life remained unaccounted
for, between his disappearance from the club and his reappearance in Town
S as Daisuké Taniguchi.
“Um, can I ask you a question?” said Yanagisawa when Kido at last
raised his head.
“Certainly.”
“Was it suicide?”
Kido’s eyes went wide for a moment. Then he gave several small
shakes of his head. “As far as I can determine, no.”
“Yeah? Phew . . . See, when I heard a lawyer was coming all the way
out here, I had a bad feeling about it.”
Kido was tempted momentarily to let him in on a few more of the
details but decided to change the subject.
Yanagisawa seemed to pick up on Kido’s evasiveness, but left off on
questioning him about the issue and sounded as though he were ready to tie
up their conversation when he said, “Did Makoto do any more boxing after
that?”
“It seems not.”
“Oh yeah? OK . . .” Yanagisawa reached for the photo of Makoto Hara
and Rié on the table to take another look. “It’s a shame he died so young . . .
but I’m glad he was happy in the end.”
Kido wasn’t sure if Yanagisawa was speaking to him or to the photo
but replied anyway. “Yes,” he agreed. “I really do believe he was happy.”
“I’m also really glad to hear that he made it to the finish line without
hurting anyone like he always feared. I wish I could tell him I told you so.
Yup . . . There are so many things I wish I could say to him now . . . the
prez too, I bet.”
Although Kido was still concerned for the safety of Daisuké
Taniguchi, he felt in the moment that what Yanagisawa had said was true
and merely replied, “Indeed.”
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN

When Kido returned home from the boxing club, he wrote out the story of
Makoto Hara told by Kosuge and Yanagisawa as best he could remember it
with the aid of his hurriedly scribbled notes. At the same time, he
reorganized the information he had gathered in his yearlong investigation,
bringing cohesion to his scattered memories. His intention was to finally
report his findings to Rié. And in the process, he noticed something so
simple, he was amazed it had until then eluded him.
Omiura had originally come to Kido’s attention when he’d read about
the 2007 case of a family register swap between a sixty-seven-year-old man
and a fifty-five-year-old man from Adachi ward. According to the blog of
someone writing under the pseudonym “Courtroom Fiend,” who had
listened in on the trial in person, Omiura’s career in “past laundering” had
begun the previous year. Oddly, what seemed to have inspired him to get
into the racket was a news report concerning the murder of James Bulger in
1993.
In this infamous case, a pair of ten-year-old boys abducted a two-year-
old named James Bulger from a shopping center in Liverpool, UK,
proceeding to torture and then murder him. Shock at the incident reached
global proportions, spreading outrage and a kind of cynical frustration.
When the two murderers completed their eight-year prison terms at the age
of eighteen, they were given new identities so that they could start over as
“different people” before being released, despite a vociferously opposed
protest movement. Then, in June 2006, a tabloid revealed that one of them
was working an office job and had gotten married without anyone realizing
who he was.
 At news of this development, the blog claimed, Omiura had a “eureka
moment” and came up with the idea of selling and swapping family
registers. Purportedly, he had laundered many more registers than the police
ever detected, and Kido now supposed that the reason he had continually
called him “Korean” was that his clientele had included many Koreans and
foreigners or else that he’d had expectations of such demand. The blog went
on to explain that many of Omiura’s customers engaged in multiple register
trades if they were dissatisfied, and it was this fact that finally jogged
Kido’s mind into a realization.
The suggestion that X, aka Makoto Hara, had foisted his family
register on Shozo Tashiro, making a mentally handicapped vagrant adopt
the identity of an infamous murderer’s son, had nagged at Kido, making his
drawn-out game of detective seem futile. As naive as it was, he simply
could not reconcile that deed with the kind husband that lived in Rié’s
memory. But if Tashiro’s tenuous testimony could be believed, it had not
been Hara who traded with him after all. Or at the very least, Tashiro had
never met the real Hara, merely someone using Hara’s name.
This forced Kido to modify his initial conjecture. For if Hara’s first
register swap hadn’t been with Tashiro, then it had to have been with a
different man. In all likelihood, it had been this man who’d dumped Hara’s
undesirable identity on Tashiro. And it was Kido’s supposition that this man
had originally been “Yoshihiko Sonézaki,” the name written on Omiura’s
postcard.
So from Hara’s perspective, the series of events would have been as
follows: First, Hara had learned about Omiura online or through some other
source and become Sonézaki. Then, probably dissatisfied with the Sonézaki
identity for some reason, he had swapped his new register with Daisuké
Taniguchi and gone to Town S, where he met Rié.
If this was correct, the upshot was that the real Daisuké now went by
“Yoshihiko Sonézaki.” Assuming of course that he hadn’t swapped his
register again. And assuming that he was still alive.

Kido watched as Makoto Hara, a long-neglected and for some time

nebulous person, remerged through the text on his computer screen and
took on a definitive existence once again. He was used to putting events and
people into words—this was the essence of his work as a lawyer—but
unlike the documents he drafted for court, he was under no requirement to
pare down his writing for any specific purpose, and did his utmost to
include as much detail, even trivia, as possible. He performed this task with
the devotion of family members at a crematorium, trying to gather up as
much of the ashes of their kin as they could.
In the days when Hara still existed in the flesh, the past Kido now
revealed had been left to slide into oblivion. Or perhaps Hara had sought to
erase it, to slough off what could only ever be a burden and a fetter so long
as he was a corporeal being that wished to be alive. But now that his
physical matter was gone and the woman who loved him was willing to
open her heart and understanding to all that he once was, there was no
longer any obstacle to restoring him in his entirety, past and all.
Whether the individual fashioned in the process still ought to be called
“Makoto Hara” Kido wasn’t sure. But no longer beguiled by mere
fragments of information, he found his anxiety begin to fall away and
perceived himself coalescing, kneaded into unity, in sync with this new
person taking form.

Kido was keenly aware that his game of detective had stretched on far too
long. Nevertheless, his anticipation of its approaching end and the
emptiness that would surely follow called forth unspeakable loneliness.
Yes, loneliness. He did not shy from this word to express the dark
emotion that had been seething in his chest of late. It was a bottomless,
middle-aged kind of loneliness that he never could have even conceived of
when he was younger, a loneliness that saturated him with bone-chilling
sentimentality the moment he let down his guard.
At such times, Kido often pictured Makoto Hara wailing facedown in
that park in Kita-Senju. The spectacle appeared to him cut loose from time
and place, like a scene from myth. No doubt collapsing in tears on the spot
was a superhuman deed. And yet somehow, Kido felt the pain of the man’s
cheek scraping against the pebbled, sandy ground as though it had been his
own.
According to an article about Kenkichi Kobayashi, he was born in
Yokkaichi in 1951. When he was a young child, his parents were too poor
to provide him with enough food, and he was forced to endure his father’s
frenzied violence. In his teenage years, he turned delinquent, dropped out of
high school, and idled around until he eventually found work at a local
factory, cut off his parents, and began to live alone.
At the age of twenty-one, he married a woman two years his junior
and, three years later, she gave birth to his only child, Makoto. Kobayashi
physically abused both Makoto and his wife on a daily basis, but just as in
his formative years, it was not an era in which such things were treated as a
serious problem. Until Makoto turned five, anyone on the outside would
have seen them as a typical family.
Then, as Kobayashi was approaching thirty, he reunited with a shady
friend from his middle school days, who triggered his obsession with
gambling and thereby precipitated his plunge into debt. By the time
Kobayashi committed his murders in the summer of 1985, collectors had
reportedly been hounding him for some time.
Kobayashi became acquainted with the construction company
president who would refuse his pleas for cash through the local kids’ club
that Makoto belonged to. During the slaughter of this man along with his
wife and child, Kobayashi stole ¥136,000, enough for two months’ rent, and
set fire to the house before going straight home. He was apprehended a
week later. The article described his crimes as “inhuman” for their rashness,
ruthlessness, and inclusion of a child. Given that Kobayashi had murdered
three people, it was seen as a foregone conclusion that he would receive the
death penalty. He didn’t even bother disputing the charges against him nor
did he seek to appeal the lower court verdict.
Kido considered the possibility that he might run into someone like
Kobayashi and that for a similarly absurd reason he, his wife, and his son
might be killed. The very idea put him in an awful mood, and when he
imagined the murder weapon—a long-bladed chef’s knife—piercing Sota’s
smooth, youthful, fragile skin, he could barely hold himself together.
And yet, his dread and indignation at the irrationality of it all did not
automatically translate to hatred for Kobayashi. His feelings would
certainly have been different if he had been affected directly. But partly due
to his professional experience, Kido knew that such tragic situations were
all too common and perceived them as something destined and accidental.
Unfortunately—yes, this was literally unfortunate—people like
Kobayashi actually existed. None of the innumerable factors—whether
inherited or acquired, contingent or necessary—that had been involved in
propelling him to commit his crimes were in any way exceptional or
unprecedented in human history. If anything, the whole matrix of conditions
had been so banal as to elicit a sigh.
Kido did not think that this in any way absolved Kobayashi of
responsibility for what he had done. At the same time, while Kido could not
take the extreme position of completely denying individual free will, it was
an established fact that Kobayashi’s early childhood environment had been
deplorable, and Kido took it as self-evident that this had contributed
significantly to his degeneration.
In allowing this, the state had neglected to remedy the misfortune of
one of its citizens. It had nonetheless exterminated him via capital
punishment for violating the legal order it upheld, looking on with
implacable righteousness, as though reality thereby accorded with justice.
Kido believed this was wrong. For the judiciary to cancel out such a failure
of the legislative and executive branches by nullifying the existence of the
resulting lawbreaker was simply disingenuous. If such a system went
unchallenged, a vicious cycle would emerge in which the blighted citizenry
needed to be executed in ever greater numbers as the state slipped further
and further into decline.

Despite his firm convictions, Kido had never actively tried to discuss them
with anyone. He wasn’t sure if other people would understand—least of all
his wife, who, he knew from one conversation they’d had, found his
reasoning incomprehensible. This was back when Sota had just turned one.
While the two of them were watching the news, they began to discuss what
ought to happen if someone murdered Sota.
“The murderer should be executed,” she said. “Don’t you think?”
 “Under Japan’s present laws, murdering a single person does not
garner the death penalty, I’m afraid. It simply wouldn’t be on the table,
legally speaking.”
“Fine. Then what if it was the two of us, Sota and I? You must agree
that the murderer should be executed then?”
Kido could tell that Kaori wasn’t going to let him dodge the question
and braced himself before giving his reply. “If we are ever going to wipe
away the evil of murder, then as a fundamental baseline condition, we need
to reject the idea that it is acceptable to kill in extreme cases. It may not be
easy, but I believe that that is what we should be aiming for. Offenders will
surely never be forgiven, but the state should bear the blame for the social
conditions underlying their crimes and take responsibility by providing
substantial support to the victims, instead of feigning innocence and
pandering to punitive sentiments. Whatever policy is chosen, my view is
that the state must never descend to the same ethical lows as the evil of
murder.”
Kaori’s eyes trembled, red with anger and disappointment. She stared
at him as though doubting that human blood flowed through his veins. But
perceiving that continuing the conversation would beckon an irreversible
and devastating shift in their relationship, they quickly broke it off. What
point was there in fighting over a tragedy that hadn’t even occurred?

Another reason that Kido found it difficult to bear ill will toward Kenkichi
Kobayashi was that, after everything he had learned, he had developed a
strong affinity for his son, Makoto Hara, relating viscerally to his many
ordeals.
He imagined how Hara must have felt the morning he learned about
the murder of his friend and his friend’s parents. Although the boy his
father killed was a few years older than Hara, they were in the same kids’
club and practiced softball together. Hara had often been over to play at
their house—what would later become the crime scene—as the boy’s
parents had let them keep bats, bases, and other equipment there.
Kido pictured the uproar on the block as ambulance and police sirens
blared, the crowds of parents thronging the elementary school auditorium
where crying voices rang out. The morning the police arrived, the
cameramen roaring as they pushed and jostled for a shot, Hara’s father
apprehended and taken in. Then the reporters who singled him out for
questioning on his way to school, asking about his dead friend and the
condition of his father. And finally, Hara himself looking confused as he
studied the look of disbelief that his mother had worn since it all began . . .
Kido felt troubled and disturbed on Hara’s behalf. Saw him as an adult
walking up ahead. Couldn’t think what to call out to him.

From the underground platform of Motomachi-Chukagai Station, Kido rode

escalator after escalator up through the building. His destination was
America Yama Park on the roof, where the kids from Sota’s day care often
played around this time of day. Although he was already set to pick up Sota
earlier than usual, he was anxious as always to see him as soon as he could
and, on his long ascent, time seemed to move inexorably slow.
The park consisted of lawns and flower beds divided by gently
inclining cobblestone paths that stretched toward the Yokohama Foreign
General Cemetery. It had been completed by the city of Yokohama in 2009
to commemorate 150 years since the opening of the port.
When Kido arrived, it was twilight. In spite of the brisk early February
air, the twenty-odd children had the zippers of their down jackets undone to
their chests as they gamboled about ecstatically in their yellowish-green
hats. Sota was some ways off, laughing uproariously as he toddled after his
friend at full tilt.
Kido greeted the young teacher. After reporting that his son had had a
safe, uneventful day, she called out loudly to Sota. Several kids had already
noticed Kido and were pointing at him, shouting, “Look. Sota’s dad!”
Sota’s eyes sparkled bashfully when he spotted his father. The nuance
of his smile shifted, his expression suggesting both embarrassment at being
watched by his dad and expectations of him that his friends could never
fulfill.
“Sota’s dad!”
Before Sota could reach Kido, several little ones charged in and
pounced. The kids at the day care seemed to have pegged him as an
ultraplayful dad ever since he had casually hugged them when they
rollicked around him on parent observation day. As usual, a pack of them
surrounded him in a flash and made Sota jealous.
“He’s my dad!” he cried as he arrived on the scene and began to yank
the kids off Kido.
“Hey! You’ll hurt them if you pull like that,” said Kido as he gently
drew Sota against him.
“Today, when Ryo and Kohei were fighting, Sota told them it was
wrong and made them stop!” one of the kids reported to Kido.
“It’s true!” said another. “Right, Sota?”
“Oh wow, did he really?” said Kido. “Good job, son.”
It suddenly occurred to him that the day might come when one of
these innocent children killed someone. Even if none of the kids present
ever did, there was another five-year-old child out there, frolicking with his
friends in just the same way, who undoubtedly would. Either backed into a
corner or through ignorance of what is right. Whose responsibility would
that be? Kido maintained his broad smile as he considered the question.
When Kenkichi Kobayashi was five years old, perhaps he’d been just
another innocent child like these. But no, more likely his pain and trauma
had been plain to see. As far as Kido could tell from the reports of the
James Bulger case, the conditions in which his ten-year-old murderers had
grown up were just as abysmal—the fierce pressure from British public
opinion to make them answer for their crimes notwithstanding. According
to Japanese criminal law, anyone under nineteen fell under the Juvenile Act,
and only perpetrators older than that were culpable. But it wasn’t as though
cumulative negative influence suddenly vanished the moment a person
reached adulthood, like a debt being reset to zero.
Individual effort was surely worthy of praise, but did it amount to
anything more than having the good fortune to encounter the right people
and events to orient you toward it? Nakakita, for example, was convinced
of the perspective taken by recent biology that a person’s character was
determined by the synergy between genetic and environmental factors and
believed that the exclusionary dichotomy between nature and nurture was
specious. It went without saying that he dismissed the assertion that
everything is the responsibility of the individual as the pinnacle of folly.
Kido was of exactly the same opinion.
After Kido returned home, such thoughts continued to pester him. And
eventually he recalled a recent conversation with Kyoichi that had some
bearing on them.
Several days earlier, Kido had called Kyoichi to fill him in on what he
had uncovered about Makoto Hara thus far. It was the first time they had
been in touch in many months, and part of the reason Kido had decided to
reach out was that Rié had requested he keep Kyoichi informed. At the
same time, he wanted to solve the one remaining mystery: Hara’s doings
over the nine years between his leaving the club and meeting Rié. Most
important of all was confirming whether Hara had harmed Daisuké during
that period, and to that end, enlisting the Taniguchis to help find Daisuké
seemed like the key.
“What? Are you fucking serious? What?” Kyoichi had said repeatedly
on the phone, bringing the conversation to a temporary stall. “So it’s just
like I told you. That guy bumped off my brother.” His tone was far graver
than at their previous meeting. “I mean, he’s the kid of a crazed murderer.”
“We can’t go jumping to any conclusions,” said Kido, feeling
uncharacteristically worked up. “His goal, remember, was to free himself
from that background and be accepted by society. Killing someone would
have undermined everything he’d worked toward.”
Kyoichi snorted as though rankled both by what Kido had said and
how he’d said it. “Not if he made sure no one found out. You make him
sound way too logical for a guy with a father like that. If he lost it, there’s
no telling what he might do.”
“By the time Hara-san met your brother, he was most likely going by
the name Sonézaki. In other words, he was no longer the child of a convict.
That is the reason, I expect, that your brother was willing to trade family
registers with him. With a middleman arranging everything, there would
have been nothing to gain by killing the other party for his register.”
“I’m sorry, but you’re just guessing, right? How is that any better than
wild speculation? Got any evidence to back it up? I can think of a million
reasons why that guy might have killed Daisuké. Like, what if he wanted to
silence him after Daisuké learned the secret of who he was?”
“Extremely unlikely.”
 “How so?”
“I just don’t believe he was that sort of person.”
“Huh? Sensei, are you off your rocker? Based on what?”
“I spoke with people who knew him well.”
“He’s a damn human being. Everyone has something they’re not
showing, you know.”
“Be that as it may, in order to ascertain the truth either way, I’m asking
you to help me find your brother. Please.”
Kyoichi should have had no reason to refuse, whatever his history
with his brother, but he was just as angry as Kido and refused to give him a
clear answer.
After Kido hung up, he continued to stew over Kyoichi’s infuriating
remarks about how the child of a murderer would take after their parent.
But as he was rehearsing rebuttals in his head, he found his confidence in
his own arguments beginning to wane.

Kido had tried to understand Kobayashi’s murderousness as resulting from

the influence of his father’s violence. But if he were going to take such a
line of reasoning, then he had to admit that Kyoichi’s belief that Hara was
prone to criminality had some merit to it, as Hara’s home environment had
been just as wretched. A case could also be made for their genetic
similarities, including—to Hara’s endless dismay—their looks. Was it too
cruel to the memory of Hara to point out the irony of his artwork, like
reflections of his pure heart, being nearly identical to the paintings his
father had produced on death row?
Kyoichi wasn’t alone in seeing Hara as a threat to society. Countless
others had done the same. In fact, no one had fretted more over the risk that
Hara might have posed than Hara himself. Even though the child is their
own person and no one is obliged to rectify the deeds of their parents, he
took it upon himself to balance out the asymmetry between the family of
the victims who went on grieving and the family of the perpetrators who did
not. That is, he lived in constant danger of being crushed between the past
and the future, between his need to suffer for his father’s sins and his terror
of recapitulating them.
 But something about this train of thought struck Kido as beside the
point. Ultimately, none of it overturned his belief in what he had said to
Kyoichi. I just don’t believe he was that sort of person. For if everyone who
met Hara had declared this from the start, Hara would never have felt the
need to trade his family register. And he might have been able to go on
being Makoto Hara even to this day.
 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

After a dinner of sukiyaki, Sota said that he wanted his mother to put him to
bed that night, so Kido left him in Kaori’s hands after bath time and did the
washing up in the kitchen. Then he lay on the couch listening to Meshell
Ndegeocello, as his mind rambled through memories of playing bass in his
university days. If only I’d been as good a player as Nakakita, I might still
be in a band and have a great way to get some downtime. Vague thoughts
came one after the next. At some point, he drifted off, exhausted.
It was after eleven o’clock when he awoke. The tips of his bare toes
were cold, so he turned up the heat. On impulse, he then flicked on the
television, though he rarely watched it. After channel surfing for a while,
footage of a menacing crowd caught his eye. Holding aloft Rising Sun flags
and screaming such obscenities as “Send the Koreans to the gas chambers!”
they paraded along a street in broad daylight. It was part of a news feature
on hate speech and, cursing his luck, Kido went to turn it off.
But when the caption shifted to “Counterprotesters on the Scene” and
a woman holding a placard that read, “Can’t we just get along? Chinhage
jinaeyo!” appeared, Kido leapt to his feet in astonishment. Though she was
only on screen for a split second, he felt certain it was Misuzu.
What was she doing there? he wondered and at that moment heard a
voice behind him.
“Daddy.”
Turning around, he found Sota standing there rubbing his sleep-filled
eyes.
“Oh. Is something wrong?”
“I woke up . . . ,” said Sota, ambling over to the couch. “What are you
watching?”
 With the sound of two crowds of demonstrators shouting at each other
over a line of police in his ears, Kido couldn’t even begin to think how to
explain. And before he had the chance to try, the screen suddenly went
black.
“Come along, Sota,” said Kaori. “You’ve got to sleep.”
She seemed to have come in search of Sota and now placed the remote
noisily on the table. It annoyed Kido to have the TV turned off on him
without warning. And Kaori said not a word before she returned to the
bedroom with Sota in tow.
Kido made a move to turn the TV back on with another remote within
arm’s reach but immediately realized that he was no longer in the mood and
was forced to yield by default to his wife’s intervention.
He tried to recall whether it had indeed been Misuzu a moment ago.
Already the memory was hazy. He remembered how she had brought up the
counter-demonstrations over lunch near the Yokohama Museum of Art.
“Then I’m going to go in your place, Kido-san,” she had said. But Kido
hadn’t taken her seriously. In fact, he had almost forgotten all about it. They
hadn’t been in touch of late, and it surprised him to learn that she had
secretly fulfilled that promise. He smiled, thinking how quintessentially
Misuzu it was, but realized that his feelings about what she had done were
complicated, somewhere between joy and dismay. Kido was glad that he
occupied a significant place in her world. What she had done could not
have been easy. Yet he could not welcome her participation in the counter-
demonstration with categorical approval and had to sigh at his own
nitpicking.
His reservations were connected with the way he perceived Zainichi,
which he had often thought was more or less the same as the way Levin in
Anna Karenina perceived peasants:

If he had been asked whether he liked or didn’t like

the peasants, Konstantin Levin would have been
absolutely at a loss what to reply. He liked and did not
like the peasants, just as he liked and did not like men
in general. Of course, being a good-hearted man, he
liked men rather than he disliked them, and so too
 with the peasants. But like or dislike “the people” as
something apart he could not, not only because he
lived with “the people,” and all his interests were
bound up with theirs, but also because he regarded
himself as a part of “the people,” did not see any
special qualities or failings distinguishing himself and
“the people,” and could not contrast himself with
them.

Moreover, Kido’s sense of discomfort when those with whom he felt

an ideological affinity attempted to involve themselves in Zainichi issues
was expressed well by Levin’s frequent criticism of his elder brother,
Ivanovitch:

Just as he liked and praised a country life in

comparison with the life he did not like, so too he
liked the peasantry in contradistinction to the class of
men he did not like.

Basically, Kido hated the very idea of collecting human beings into
categories. That was the sole reason he found his Zainichi background
bothersome. It should have gone without saying that some Zainichi would
be good people and some bad, and there would be things about the good
Zainichi that he disliked as well as things about the bad Zainichi that were
good even if he didn’t know it.
Another of Levin’s criticisms of Ivanovitch illustrated his qualms
perfectly:

Sergey Ivanovitch, and many other people who

worked for the public welfare, were not led by an
impulse of the heart to care for the public good, but
reasoned from intellectual considerations that it was a
right thing to take interest in public affairs, and
consequently took interest in them.
 But hold on: Wasn’t this also the exact reason that Kaori was
mistrustful of Kido’s own “care for the public good”? Not for the first time,
Kido hit upon this contradiction within himself and hugged his knee as he
lost himself in thought.
The problem of whether Kido was personally embroiled in Zainichi
issues was clearly no simple matter. Since he had grown up almost entirely
as a “Japanese person” even before he naturalized, he was profoundly
uneasy with the idea that he was either a direct victim or perpetuator of the
troubles that beset Korean enclaves. And while Levin had discovered
sincere love for “merry common labor” on that ineffably beautiful night
after he had exhausted himself toiling with peasants for a day, Kido found it
inconceivable that the same sort of fellow feeling with other Zainichi might
one day sprout in his own heart.
Kido grew tired of thinking and turned the TV back on
absentmindedly. The news feature had now returned to the studio, where
commentators were discussing xenophobia. They denounced it explicitly, a
rare sight on TV of late, while making mention of the massacre of Koreans.
The Great Kanto Earthquake that preceded this atrocity had occurred
in 1923, making the previous year its ninetieth anniversary. Ninety was a
number of marginal import, but Kido somehow felt disconcerted to think
that it was only ten more years to the centenary. A future earthquake in the
Nankai Trough and another epicentered in the Tokyo region were seen as
near certainties. While some proclaimed that this would be the end of
Japan, no one knew when such disasters might strike. In Kido’s
neighborhood, there were concerns about buildings collapsing and damage
from a potential tsunami. The latter he might ride out if he was lucky
enough to be at home on the ninth floor, but if he happened to be, for
example, playing with Sota on the waterfront at Yamashita Park, they might
not have time to run from harm’s way.
The devastation in the city would surely be catastrophic. One hundred
years since the Great Kanto Earthquake—in another decade, would terrified
fools who took the cry “Death to Koreans!” seriously come for Kido and his
family, whether in a grand display of mischief or release of pent-up
resentment? If so, the fact that he was a lawyer, a father, a music lover, a
“good person,” and all of the above would be utterly irrelevant. Or relevant
only insofar as his being endowed with such characteristics stoked their
hatred further.
You’re overthinking everything. Exasperated with himself, Kido tried
to push these worries from his mind. But his tense cheeks trembled, and in
spite of his efforts he could not put on a cheerful face. Having consulted
several records of the Great Kanto Earthquake, he knew that there were
fifty-three cases involving Koreans being murdered just counting
documented prosecutions, and that, according to the Ministry of Justice at
the time, the resulting death count was 233. In actuality—though there were
many differing theories—the tally was estimated to be several times larger,
with the lives of some Chinese taken as well. And the methods of killing
chosen were so ghastly as to make one want to throw up in disbelief.
Kido pictured the great number of brutishly defiled corpses and felt a
chill as though the cold of those robbed of their existence were touching his
skin. He suddenly felt as though they were his compatriots. He recalled his
bone-deep anxiety on the bullet train after his friend’s wake in Osaka: the
pressure that threatened to implode the region of selfhood he had spatially
monopolized via the contours of his body since birth without ever needing
anyone’s authorization. Now, Kido could feel himself identifying with
Zainichi sentiments of victimhood. While at the same time, he was forced
to take on the historical responsibility of the persecutor insofar as he was a
Japanese citizen.
When a commercial came on, Kido turned off the TV, chewed over his
thoughts of the past while, and began to feel that he had been mistaken
about something earlier. While it was true that there were all sorts of
different Zainichi, Misuzu hadn’t joined the counter-demonstrations
because she had an idealized conception of them. Rather, she had become
involved because their existence was currently under threat. Japan was in a
bad way.
“Shouldn’t Japanese people treat it as a problem with their own
country and be obligated to go to the counter-demonstrations themselves?
They’re the ones who are giving those scoundrels free rein,” Kido had told
her, even though, as a Japanese person, he should have been rushing to the
scene to show his support from day one . . .
As he was ruminating in this way, Kido felt the sickness coming over
him again and lay facedown, trying his best to clear his mind of thoughts.
And in an effort to distract himself, he called up the memory of the day he
visited the art museum with Misuzu, wishing he could see her.

Presently Kaori returned to the living room.

“What were you thinking, showing him something like that?”
Since her trip to Osaka in December, a string of events, including
Christmas and the Shogatsu holidays, had forced them to converse amiably
in order to keep up appearances for the sake of Sota and their respective
parents, and this had brought a slight improvement to their relationship.
Now, confronted with her stern gaze, Kido could only dread the
conversation that was about to unfold.
“He woke up and came out here while I was watching it,” said Kido,
as nonchalantly as he could manage.
“You should have turned it off immediately.”
Kido nodded in agreement, aware that his annoyance showed on his
face. Kaori stood there looking at him for a while, until she could no longer
resist giving him another piece of her mind.
“You know that I’m understanding about your ethnicity,” she said.
“You know I married you with full knowledge of who you are. It wasn’t as
if my family all thought it was a good idea, I’m sorry to say. I had to
persuade them—but the reality is that there are people out there like the
ones on TV just now, and we have to protect Sota from them. Didn’t we
agree that you’d tell him about your background when he’s a bit older?”
Kido changed his position on the couch and stared over the backrest at
his wife still standing there. He tried to find words, feeling the urgent need
for them to talk and a readiness to accept whatever course the conversation
might take, unsure where to even begin.
Strangely, it struck him with keen intensity how beautiful she was, as
though he were admiring a stranger. When Kido’s wife came up at the firm,
she was invariably described as a “beauty.” The teachers at Sota’s day care
seemed to concur, and Sota was proud of this. Meanwhile, Kido knew that
he had taken Kaori’s looks into account when he married her. That he
would suddenly become aware of something so well established could only
be a sign that they were on the verge of discussing divorce, and Kido just
could not bring himself to initiate it.
Kaori’s eyes tensed apprehensively, watching as her husband’s
speechlessness dragged on. She seemed to sense that he was about to
overstep the line that they had both made it to this point without crossing.
Fearing that she might preempt him by making up her mind first, Kido felt
he had to say something, anything.
“It’s agonizing for me, this situation . . . ,” he blurted. “We need to talk
about how to improve it because I don’t want our marriage to end.”
An almost imperceptibly faint smile flickered across Kaori’s face.
“Where is this coming from?” she said, tilting her face obliquely in
puzzlement.
Her reaction was not what Kido had been expecting. Though several
months earlier, she seemed to be about to broach the topic herself, she did
not now appear to have any intention of seeking divorce—on the contrary,
she seemed concerned that he would feel the need to divulge such worries.
“First,” Kido said quietly, letting his face relax, “let me say, as I’ve
said many times before, that I’m not being unfaithful to you.”
“Oh, I’m done with that. Have I brought it up lately? Even a word?”
“The silence has been disturbing in its own way.”
“You’re just projecting your fears.”
“You’ve got nerve saying that when you’re the one who doubted me,”
said Kido, twisting his cheeks to form a bitter grin. Then after a pause, “I
wasn’t being unfaithful, but it may have appeared that way because there is
a certain individual that I’ve been absorbed in investigating for the past
year. Not a woman. A man. The investigation relates to my job, so I never
brought it up.”
“Who is he?”
“The only son of a death row convict.”
Kido began to tell her the story of Makoto Hara. He began with
Kobayashi’s upbringing and the murders he committed, before going on to
describe the bullying Hara was subjected to, his ending up in an orphanage
when his mother abandoned him, his time at the boxing club, and finally the
collapse of his dream due to the “accident” after his professional debut.
At first, Kaori looked on skeptically, as though confused why he was
telling her all this. Since he related the story with great enthusiasm, she
appeared to be more intent on studying him than on listening to what he
was saying. But when he reached the part about Hara trading his family
register, she humored him by asking, “Does that sort of thing really
happen?” Although Kido fudged the precise details surrounding Rié, he
explained that Hara had married an unfortunate woman who had lost a
child, started a family with her, enjoyed a brief period of happiness, and
then died in a logging accident. Kaori listened to the end, by which point
she seemed perplexed.
“That sure is a tragic and incredible tale . . . but what does it have to
do with you?” she asked, cutting to the chase as usual.
“Good question,” he said in a self-deprecating tone. “At first, nothing.
It was just a job I took on because I felt sorry for the client. Then I grew
fascinated with the idea of leading the life of another, started to picture the
life he had wanted to throw away and . . . an escape from reality maybe? I
guess it’s kind of like reading an interesting novel for me.”
“What a sick hobby.”
“You think so?”
“What are you trying to escape?”
Kido looked at her, struggling to come up with an answer.
“All kinds of things,” he said after a pause. “After everything that’s
happened . . . I think part of it is that I’m still reeling from the earthquake.
Because it wasn’t merely a natural disaster. It triggered other disasters, like
those people they were just showing on TV.”
Kido thought of the decline in their relationship that stemmed from
such developments but did not include it in his list out loud.
“You’re not the only one.”
“True . . . I should have been more sensitive to the way it was
affecting you too.”
“Why don’t you go to therapy or something?”
“Pardon me?”
“Instead of making a mountain out of a molehill, I bet just having
someone listen to you would put you in a better space. Isn’t that what your
job is all about?”
“I’m not a therapist.”
“I know, but you offer consultation to people who can’t resolve issues
among themselves. Talking to me isn’t going to help you.”
 “I could say the same about you. To put it bluntly, there is something
about our relationship that just isn’t working anymore. I’d been thinking
that what we needed was to talk, but perhaps you’re right. If we’re going to
have a discussion, it might be more productive after counselling. And not
just me. I want you to go too.”
“I’m fine.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I consult with people when I need to.”
“But they’re not specialists, are they? I doubt you’re talking about
what really matters.”
“For example?”
“. . . Well, for starters I want you to be nicer to Sota. You scold him
too much.”
“How so?”
“That’s where your counselling can begin. You can tell the counsellor
what I just told you.”
Kaori shook her head in disgust. Kido stared at her and relaxed the
muscles in his face. Released from the suffocating imperative to resolve
something right then and there, he felt relieved, and words began to gush
out of him.
“My issue is that I have all these problems that I want to find practical
solutions to. But whenever I start to think about them, I become nauseous. I
get this excruciating sense that my existence is radically insecure. And . . .
for whatever reason, investigating the person I just told you about takes my
mind off it. I don’t really understand it myself. But the result is that I’m
able to get in touch with my life indirectly through someone else’s. And I’m
able to think about the things that I need to think about. There’s no way for
me to do this directly. My body rejects it every time I try. That’s why I said
it’s sort of like reading a novel. No one can deal with their suffering on their
own. We all seek someone else to be the conduit for our emotions. And . . .
I probably seem gloomy all the time, so I can understand why you’d think
I’m no fun to be around.”
Kaori took a seat in a chair with her arms crossed, shaking her head
softly, her look of concern somehow changed.
“But you and that man are from completely different walks of life,”
she said.
 “That must be why it works for me,” said Kido. “The gap between us
must put me at ease.”
“I don’t get it.”
“OK, so what I’m trying to say is that I want us to get along, I really
do. It wasn’t easy for me to say that, but I had to. I just can’t have you give
up on me. It would tear me apart. I thought long and hard about it, but I’m
certain of that now. I know I can’t force you to do anything you don’t want
to, so I’ve been racking my brain for some way to make you love me. It’s a
conundrum I’ve been fretting over with far more urgency in our twelfth
year of marriage than even when we were first dating.”
At the end, Kido put on a tone of farcical melodrama. He laughed at
himself, and Kaori couldn’t help joining in. Kido could hardly remember
the last time they had engaged in such a joking, ostensibly sincere
exchange, and it made him happy to see a long-absent tinge of joy on her
face.
“You’re taking everything way too negatively,” said Kaori, staring
Kido in the eye.
Kido nodded in agreement.
“Are you OK?” she asked.
“In what way? I’m fine . . .”
“Are you sure? You’re not getting any crazy ideas, are you? I couldn’t
bear it if you did something selfish like that.”
Kido truly had no idea what she was talking about. When he
eventually gleaned the meaning from her grave expression, he was shocked.
This new suspicion was even more fatuous than his alleged cheating.
“Of course not,” he said indignantly. “Crazy ideas. How could you
even suggest such a thing? With Sota around, I couldn’t possibly.”
Recalling the “accident” that had ended Makoto Hara’s boxing career,
Kido could not hide his surprise that she was worried he might do
something similar. Kaori’s face had gone pale, and she kept her eyes on
him, as though trying to divine the true meaning of his words.
“Then I guess there’s no problem,” she said.
Has the thought of such a crisis crossed her mind before? Kido
wondered, suddenly stricken with worry. They both remained silent for a
time. Then Kido slapped his knees with finality and said, “I’m glad we
could have this talk. So I guess we’ll be going separately to therapy, then.”
 “You’re too stuck on that idea. I don’t really understand it, but if it
helps you cope, why don’t you keep investigating that man for a while? Just
make sure to be cheerful around the house.”
“The investigation is almost over—if there’s anything you’d like to get
off your chest, I’d like you to speak with a therapist, or with me, if you
like.”
“I’m fine . . . Thanks for talking . . . OK, I’m off to take a bath.”
Kido watched his wife’s back as she left the living room. Then, after
gazing out on to the veranda for a while, he lay prone on the couch and
slowly shook his head. His breath had been caught in his chest, and now he
let it all out.
 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

In the death-by-overwork civil suit that Kido was overseeing, a settlement

was reached on February 15. The accused izakaya chain and its directors
were required to pay a combined total of ¥82,000,000 and agree to put in
place eight different preventative measures. It was, for all intents and
purposes, a total victory for the plaintiffs.
After giving a press conference with the family, who carried a photo of
their deceased son, Kido joined them for dinner at an Italian restaurant,
where they chatted for close to three hours. Mostly it was small talk with
barely a mention of the trial, but when it came time to say their goodbyes,
the two parents shook Kido’s hand firmly with both hands and expressed
their gratitude. While this was exceedingly gratifying for Kido, he could not
feel straightforwardly happy for them when he imagined them in their old
age. And he noted how he had maintained good form as a lawyer while
bringing this job to completion, not allowing himself to get caught up
despite the profoundly tragic nature of the case.

After his talk with Kaori, Kido felt a renewed need to bring his
investigation into Makoto Hara’s life to some kind of resolution. To achieve
this, he had to somehow locate Daisuké Taniguchi, confirm that he was
unharmed and, if possible, ask him about his meeting with Hara.
Unfortunately, the search for Daisuké was still at an impasse.
Kido had by this time given up on the idea that Kyoichi might help
out. For Kyoichi had looked up Kobayashi online and, reacting with
visceral revulsion to his crimes, seemed to want nothing to do with the
whole affair. He denounced Daisuké with more vitriol than ever, saying that
he deserved whatever he got for seeking out the places where such monsters
operated despite being born into privilege. To willingly step into this “other
world,” as Kyoichi repeatedly described it, was the decision of an idiot
beyond all hope of salvation. Kyoichi wasn’t going to be so stupid as to get
involved and risk being drawn into the same chain of crimes as his brother.
Thankfully, Kido soon discovered that he didn’t need Kyoichi after all,
when an email he happened to send Misuzu about seeing her on TV yielded
a sudden breakthrough in the case. It was his first time contacting her in
months. In her reply, Misuzu expressed surprise to hear about her
appearance in the TV feature, and told him excitedly that she had
participated in two separate counter-demonstrations. What followed was not
a drawn-out description of her experience, as Kido would have expected,
but a piece of news.
“By the way, I quit Sunny at the end of last year,” she wrote. “I have
my reasons, but I’d better tell you in person next time we meet.”
Learning that he would never again sit across from her at that bar left
Kido disappointed and forlorn. As recently as the end of January, after his
visit to the boxing club, he had toyed with the idea of popping in to see if
she was there. He now realized that she would have already been gone.
Misuzu went on to describe another surprising development: someone
had reported the Daisuké Facebook account as fake, and it had been
temporarily blocked. Although Misuzu’s access had quickly been restored,
she had stopped posting to the account, having had reservations about
impersonating Daisuké from the start. Moreover, her relationship with
Kyoichi had become, in her words, “unmanageable.” She then happened to
discover a separate Message Requests folder in her personal account and,
realizing she had several years’ worth of unchecked messages, had gone
back to the fake Daisuké account and located the same hidden folder. There,
she found a warning message from a “Yoichi Furusawa,” the name written
in Roman letters rather than Japanese script. The account had no photos and
hardly any posts. The message read:
This is a warning from the legal representative. Erase this fake,
imposter account immediately. If you do not comply, appropriate legal
measures will be taken.
No mention had been made of who he (assuming from the name
“Yoichi” that it was a “he”) supposedly represented. The account did not
appear to have been updated since, and there were no signs that any “legal
measures” had been taken against the still-noncompliant Daisuké account.
It was only natural to suppose that the account freeze had been this user’s
doing. Misuzu’s intuition was that Yoichi was Daisuké himself.
“Like, he’s doing his best to sound scary, but the way he can’t really
pull it off convincingly is just pure Daisuké.”
Kido’s own suspicion was that the message was part of an “aftercare”
package provided by Omiura’s associates for the family register swappers.
But whatever or whoever was behind it, he decided that the best approach
was to contact the user.
Misuzu’s email concluded with the line, “How is everything going
with you?” It was a typical question, but one that left Kido with a tingle of
excitement.

When Kido spoke to Nakakita, the only person at the firm with whom he
consulted about the case, and explained how Misuzu was assisting in the
search for Daisuké, Nakakita stared at him in disbelief.
“I think you’re being a bit reckless here. She’s his ex, right? What are
you going to do if it turns out she’s a stalker? Maybe this Daisuké guy
skipped town to hide from her. The story we’ve gotten so far is that he
ditched his register because he didn’t get along with his family . . . but I
wonder. What if she’s feeding you elaborate nonsense so she can track him
down?”
This unexpected criticism rendered Kido speechless. While it was hard
for him to believe that this might be true of Misuzu, he could think of
nothing to say that would justify his behavior. After all, there was no way to
know the “true past” of another. Unless they were right in front of you,
there wasn’t even any way to know what someone was doing or where they
were in the present. In fact, it might very well be hubris to believe that you
could understand a person’s true thoughts and feelings even when looking
straight at them. Nakakita’s words spread a dark shadow over the
impression of Misuzu that had captured Kido’s heart for the past year. He
found it almost unbearable.
 “Are you OK, Kido-san?” asked Nakakita just as Kido started back
toward his desk.
Kido’s eyes widened. Nakakita’s question was exactly the same as
Kaori’s.
“Why do you ask?” said Kido, forcing a smile to show him he was
fine.

Kido considered what the best approach would be for contacting the “legal
representative,” Yoichi Furusawa. If he was Daisuké Taniguchi, it would be
prudent not to bring up Kyoichi, since he would be averse to interacting
with him. Kido also took Nakakita’s point and decided to exercise caution
about mentioning Misuzu as well. Writing a message that would inspire
trust in an unidentified recipient was a challenging task. Whoever the user
turned out to be, withholding some of the details seemed like a good way to
arouse their interest. Kido settled on using the initials Y. S., rather than the
full name, Yoshihiko Sonézaki, that Daisuké presumably went by. What he
eventually came up with was the following:

Please excuse my impropriety in contacting you so

unexpectedly. This is regarding a message sent to the
account of a Mr. Daisuké Taniguchi on October 8 of
last year.
My name is Akira Kido. I am currently serving as
the attorney of Mr. Taniguchi’s wife upon her request.
I am registered as a lawyer with the Kanagawa Bar
Association and am a partner at the legal firm listed
below. Please visit our home page via the link if you
are interested in learning more about us.
Allow me to inform you that Mr. Taniguchi passed
away due to an accident that occurred in September
three years ago. I cannot provide the precise details
here. The reason I am contacting you is that, in the
process of conducting research in the hopes of
reaching a Mr. Y. S., who is said to have been
 acquainted with the late Mr. Taniguchi, I discovered
an account under Mr. Taniguchi’s name. Upon
contacting the administrator, I was made privy to a
message from you requesting the deletion of said
account.
My apologies for the impertinent question, but are
you not perhaps the legal representative of Mr. Y. S.?
If I am correct in this, I would very much appreciate if
you could reply, as there is a matter I dearly wish to
communicate to him.
Conversely, if this is all a mistake on my part, then
I ask that you forgive my lack of discretion. Please, by
all means, discard this message after reading.

Kido was not very optimistic about receiving a response. Even he

found the message fishy. But if it was indeed Daisuké Taniguchi who
received it, Kido guessed that his curiosity would be piqued when he
learned that his former self had died, his abandonment of the family register
that linked them notwithstanding. Something told Kido that part of him
longed for the life he had thrown away. And if Daisuké had indeed traded
registers with Hara when Hara was Sonézaki, then Daisuké, assuming he
still went by Sonézaki, might be worried about this exchange coming to
light through Hara’s widow.

“Yoichi Furusawa” replied that night just after 2:00 a.m., while Kido was
asleep.
“Oh boy,” Kido muttered when he saw the message the next morning.
The “legal representative” displayed as much wariness as was to be
expected, putting on a show of sangfroid but ultimately failing to hide his
distress. It was at this point that Kido came around to Misuzu’s hunch that
he was in fact Sonézaki, that is, Daisuké. With this shift in perspective, the
ineptitude of Daisuké’s efforts to disguise himself became readily apparent,
and Kido began to feel sorry for him.
 “Yoichi Furusawa” began by saying that he doubted Kido was in fact a
lawyer. While there was, as claimed, a lawyer named Akira Kido listed on
the firm’s website, Kido had provided no proof that he and this man were
one and the same. The “legal representative” then launched into a long
stream of questions, asking who Kido thought the initials Y. S. referred to,
who had created the Daisuké account, what Kido’s relationship to them
was, etc.
In his reply, Kido proposed that they talk on Skype. That way, the
“legal representative” could check that Kido was who he claimed to be
through the video feed. If he preferred to turn off video on his end and only
transmit audio, that was perfectly fine. And while Kido would prefer to
speak directly with Y. S. if possible, he had no objections to speaking with
“Yoichi Furusawa” to prove his own identity beforehand.
Kido’s message was marked as read immediately, but a reply didn’t
arrive until evening (the interval suggesting to Kido that Daisuké worked
during the day). While “Yoichi Furusawa” could not say who he
represented, his client still sought the deletion of the Daisuké account and
wished to know more about Daisuké’s death. Therefore, he would Skype
Kido at 11:00 p.m. that night.

Kido wavered about what clothes to wear but eventually chose his usual
work outfit: a dress shirt and jacket. It felt strange to put his arms through
well-ironed sleeves after giving Sota his bath and putting him to bed. The
call from “Yoichi Furusawa” came at five past eleven.
“Good evening. This is Kido . . . Are you there?”
Kido waited for a response.
“Is this Furusawa-san? Can you see me OK?”
Kido put on a mild expression that stopped short of smiling, as he did
when meeting a client for the first time. There was no reaction. For a
moment, Kido began to worry that he had lost the connection forever.
“Kido here. Can you see me? Furu—”
“Yes . . . I can see you.”
“Oh . . .” Kido shuddered at the sound of the man’s trembling voice
coming from beyond the blacked-out display window. Could this be the real
Daisuké Taniguchi? he wondered. Is this the man I’ve been seeking for
more than a year now? Kido was holding his breath and realized that he had
to respond.
“And you can hear me?” he asked, using a genial tone so as not to
startle him.
“Yes,” said the man.
“Great. Thank you for agreeing to talk.”
“You’re welcome.”
The way the man’s words reverberated in the silence conjured a
cramped studio apartment. Although his voice had the muffled timbre
common in middle age, there was an awkwardness to it that suggested he
was altering it on purpose. By audio chat, he seemed incapable of
dissembling his fear and doubt, in contrast to the attempted magisterial tone
of his messages. This struck Kido as both comical and sad. Out of the blue,
he recalled Nakakita’s claim that any fan of Michael Schenker had to be a
“good dude.”
“So was I correct in supposing that you’re the legal representative of
Yoshihiko Sonézaki?” Kido asked, not beating around the bush.
“Yes,” the man immediately replied.
As his tone was uncertain, Kido suddenly felt discouraged, doubting
again that it was Daisuké Taniguchi and suspecting it might be one of his
friends or another stand-in.
“As I explained by message, Daisuké Taniguchi passed away three
years ago. His widow is seeking information about certain aspects of his
life.”
“Taniguchi-san . . . was . . . married?”
“Yes. Married with two children.”
“What does his wife do for a living?”
“She runs a stationery shop.”
“Does she? What does she want to know?”
“I cannot discuss those details with anyone other than Sonézaki-san
himself.”
“. . . Like . . . I’m his attorney.”
“I have no way to confirm that,” said Kido with a bland smile.
“How much do you know already?”
 “Most of it, I expect. I’d like to meet with Sonézaki-san first. Then, if
he so desires, I can fill him in on everything that’s been happening.”
An awkward pause followed.
“Listen,” said Kido, “the deal that was made between Taniguchi-san
and Sonézaki-san is none of my concern. But as a legal expert, I want him
to be aware of certain problems that could arise when he dies and am
willing to offer my advice pro bono. This is a rare opportunity. I believe I
can be of service to him.”
Kido said this in the hopes of enticing the man, feeling almost certain
again that he was Daisuké Taniguchi. The silence beyond the black window
stretched out again. Kido heard a sound like the click of a tongue as the
man moved his mouth, apparently in thought.
“Have you met with Misuzu Goto?” the man asked with new
authority, as though he had just absorbed the authentic manner of a legal
representative from Kido.
“Y-yes,” said Kido, surprised that he would bring her up so abruptly.
“I have.”
“Does Goto-san really believe that that person on Facebook is Daisuké
Taniguchi? Who exactly is behind that account? Kyoichi Taniguchi?”
“That is another issue for me to discuss with Sonézaki-san himself. In
person.”
“Wait . . . please don’t go yet. My client is concerned about whether
Goto-san is doing well.”
“She seems to be. As far as I can tell.”
“I have a message for her.”
“From whom?”
“My client.”
“What is it?”
“. . . He says he’d like to apologize.”
Kido stared at the black window for a while, lost for words. He almost
forgot for a moment that the man could see him.
“Okeydokey. I will convey the message.”
“Also, my client says that, whatever happens, he doesn’t want you to
tell Kyoichi Taniguchi that he can be reached this way.”
“You have my word,” said Kido. “In any case, I would like to meet
with Sonézaki-san to discuss everything in greater detail. Would you mind
passing that on for me? I’ll meet him wherever is most convenient.”
“OK . . .”
“I look forward to hearing back, then.”
“Yeah . . . talk to you soon . . .”

When the call ended, Kido sat where he was, looking straight up with his
mouth hanging open. He wasn’t entirely certain what the apology was
supposed to be about, but he guessed it was for vanishing without a word.
Either way, it was now clear that Nakakita’s concern about Misuzu being a
stalker had been needless. Although the man had hardly spoken, Kido had
picked up on the remorse he bore toward Misuzu and sensed that it had
gained a fresh luster in recent years.
Kido pitied the man his apparently pinched lifestyle and was ashamed
to remember the time he had posed as Daisuké Taniguchi in that bar in
Miyazaki, going as far as to appropriate his romantic relationship with
Misuzu. At the same time, a feeling that could only be jealousy smoldered
inside him.
The next day, Kido called Misuzu and told her about the Skype call.
“That is so definitely Daisuké! I can just picture him . . . I mean, first
of all, I don’t know anyone named Sonézaki.”
When Kido relayed the apology, she merely gave a weak laugh.
“Are you going to meet him?” she asked.
“Well, that’s the plan. I’m fairly confident he’ll agree to see me.
Which is great because it’s high time for me to conclude this game of make-
believe detective.”
“Maybe I should go with you.”
“Oh . . . You want to come? Shall I ask him?”
“If he says he doesn’t want me there, tell him that if he’s going to
apologize he should darn well do it in person. I guarantee you he’ll say
yes.”
When Kido sent a message to “Yoichi Furusawa” with Misuzu’s
request, he replied that his client did not want to meet her. So Kido told him
what Misuzu had said and after a slight delay another message came: Mr.
Sonézaki has consented to having Goto-san attend.
The date was set for the first Saturday of March; the location, Nagoya.
 CHAPTER NINETEEN

Kido and Misuzu coordinated their plans so that they could sit together on
the Nozomi bullet train for Nagoya. Since she boarded at the Tokyo Station
terminal and he farther down the line at Shin Yokohama, she was already
there when Kido stepped onto the reserved-ticket car, greeting him with a
wave and a smile.
“Did you cut your hair?” he asked.
“Yesterday.”
“Oh. Specifically for today?”
“No. Just a coincidence.”
The hair spilling from her knit cap had been dyed a new, dark shade of
brown and now barely reached her shoulders. Dressed in the same style as
before, she wore tight denim jeans with a military-style jacket. This was
Kido’s third time meeting Misuzu, but it was his first time sitting beside her.
He caught the sweet bitterness of her citrusy perfume. Kido had come in a
suit with no tie.
Although their bullet train left after nine o’clock in the morning, it was
mostly empty, and the seats in front and back of their two-seater block were
empty. As the ride to Nagoya took an hour and a half, they spent the time
catching up on the past few months, during which Misuzu told him about
quitting the bar.
“Takagi was coming on to me hard and I just couldn’t take it
anymore,” she explained with a pained grin. “At first I thought he was half
kidding, but the lines he fed me kept getting more and more real.”
“It was obvious that he was interested in you.”
“You could tell?”
 “Well, yes . . . I can’t say I blame him. Anyone stuck behind a
cramped counter like that with a beautiful woman like you is bound to
develop feelings.”
“It’s the same old pattern. They always lust for me like that. No one
wants anything serious.” Misuzu said this as though it were funny, and Kido
watched her smile in profile.
“There were other things too,” she said. “I just couldn’t get into
chatting with customers anymore. Ever since I went to those demos, being
in that bar felt like a chore. I wasn’t working there for the money. I only got
into it for a laugh. If it wasn’t going to be fun, there was no point. And
standing on my feet all night started to wear on me. I’m not as young as I
used to be!”
“I wish I could have gone there one last time before you quit. Your
vodka gimlet was superb!”
“Come on. I can make you one of those anytime. But I can’t drink
when I’m working the bar, so next time let’s go out drinking together.”
A vision of his future transforming, depending on how he handled this
one invitation, momentarily kindled inside Kido and then immediately
flickered out.
“You were drinking even when I was there,” he said evasively.
“That was the only time,” she said with a laugh, seemingly oblivious
to the dodge. “I never drink behind the counter.”
Misuzu went on to complain how she had been forced to abandon the
Daisuké account because of Kyoichi. He had been hitting on her with
similar persistence, precipitating a huge argument.
“That jerk doesn’t care about finding Daisuké. He was just using it as
an excuse to stay in touch with me.”
“It’s amazing that he would behave that way after swearing with such
conviction that his brother had been murdered . . . I don’t think he’s a bad
person, but it’s hard for me to see where he’s coming from on this.”
“Oh, this sort of thing is nothing new. There’s a history to it . . . I
never told you, but I may have had something to do with the falling-out
between the brothers. You see, Kyoichi had a crush on me.”
“Oh boy . . . How did I guess?”
“Women flock to Kyoichi. He’s not my type at all. Too much of a
player. Daisuké is clumsy. He’s not all that handsome. And he’s the kind of
guy that’s just begging to be made fun of. He asks for it, acting like he
enjoys being the butt of everyone’s jokes. He’ll be all smiles on the surface
until suddenly he can’t take it anymore and goes ballistic. Who isn’t going
to be put off by that? Like, what’s with this guy, all of a sudden? But there’s
actually nothing sudden about it.”
The Daisuké Taniguchi that Misuzu was describing struck Kido as
completely different from both the one that Kyoichi had griped about and
the one Rié had heard about through Makoto Hara.
“Do you think those personality quirks were in the background with
the liver transplant dilemma?”
“Yeah, I’d say so, maybe? But that’s a far cry from your classmate
asking to borrow some money, don’t you think?”
“Of course.”
“Kyoichi liked to belittle his brother, so he could never accept that I
would start dating him.”
“He seems to have a lot of pride.”
“That’s part of it . . . ,” said Misuzu with a wry smile. Then, looking
around as if to check who was listening, “You know how boys around high
school age have a crazy powerful sex drive?”
“Ha, ha. Well, sure.”
“Kyoichi just couldn’t stand that Daisuké was having sex with me.
Like there was something inside him thrashing about in a mad frenzy.”
Kido burst into laughter and kept laughing for a while. Misuzu was
drawn in by his mirth and began to laugh too.
“So this is not some fairy tale about his enduring love,” she said.
“Kyoichi just wants to screw me. Even though I’m getting older and I’m
sure he wouldn’t get much out of it, for him, it’s not even about what I’m
really like now. He just won’t let it go until he’s added me to the notches on
his belt.”
“I suppose he’s hoping to free himself from his humiliation in the
past.”
“You can relate to that sort of thing?”
“Yup . . . I cannot say that it defies my understanding.”
“Really?! So you feel the same kind of desire for conquest?”
“Ahem, it would be dishonest of me to say that I don’t, though I
suppose it’s a question of degree. Insofar as there is the possibility of
hurting women, I believe we need to reflect on that desire, whether we are
aware that we have it or not. The same goes for the wretched jealousy and
competitiveness that can arise between men . . . Have you heard of
triangular desire? Was it René Girard? The idea is that human beings never
desire others one-on-one but develop an attraction for someone because
there is a rival that wants them too.”
“Wow . . . But then why would the rival have come to like that person
in the first place?”
“Oh, right. Chicken and egg . . . Could they be deluded, thinking
there’s a rival when there isn’t? Or could they be some kind of genius or
misfit?”
“So you’re saying that Daisuké only fell in love with me because he
sensed Kyoichi’s rivalry?”
“Whoops . . . Apologies. Our conversation seems to have taken a
wrong turn.”
Misuzu studied Kido’s face, wearing an expression he found difficult
to read, like she couldn’t quite put away the remnants of her smile.
“You’re a very honest and serious person, Kido-san,” she said.
“I don’t know about that. I think I just try to show people the good
parts of me.”
“People have many different faces.”
“We talked about that, didn’t we?” said Kido with a smile. He said
nothing about his twisted feelings toward the Taniguchi brothers vis-à-vis
Misuzu and felt like a pathetic weasel for having brought up Girard in an
effort to obscure them.
Misuzu looked vaguely out the window, gazing wordlessly at Mount
Fuji as it appeared in the distance after a long stretch of industrial
bleakness. Then, turning slowly back to Kido, she said, “This kind of thing
happens to me all the time. I don’t hate my face, but it always seems to get
me into trouble. My problem is that I have no clue how to use it to my own
advantage.”
“I can see how that might be a struggle.”
“When I tell people this, I get a lecture about how it’s my fault
because I leave a crack in my defenses that gives men the wrong
impression. Take Takagi. The way he tried to get me to go home with him
after work was just vulgar, but he was never like that when I went there as a
customer.”
“I don’t think it’s your fault.”
Misuzu smiled sourly. Then, after a pause, she seemed to suddenly
realize something wonderful and said, “For the past year or so, I’ve had a
crush on someone.”
“Oh, is that right?” said Kido, pretending nonchalance when he was in
fact somewhat taken aback. While he told himself it was entirely to be
expected that she would, of course, be attracted to someone, he was
appalled at his atrociously poor ability to pick up on such feelings in
women, which had not improved one iota since high school. It had always
caught him off guard when girls asked him out, and rumors about who liked
who had never failed to surprise him.
He understood perfectly well that there was another Misuzu besides
the one he had met at the bar and with whom he was in contact about
Daisuké Taniguchi. And he was aware of how many “friends” she was
presumably viewing on Facebook. Nevertheless, out of sheer naivety, he
had never thought to direct his jealousy beyond those close at hand, such as
Takagi and the Taniguchi brothers. Now, thanks to this rival she had
mentioned, though they had never even met, Kido could almost feel his
chimeric vision of the other life he evoked through Misuzu being goaded on
by triangular desire.
“He came to the bar once,” Misuzu continued. “I’m usually
surrounded by unsophisticated men who call me ‘chick’ and ‘babe.’ But he
was different from any of the men I’d ever known. He was the intellectual
type. Toward me, he played the gentleman. His language was polite, even
online, and he was always honest and serious and intelligent.”
Kido nodded along while he listened, thinking that if she just wanted
someone who wouldn’t call her “chick,” he fit the bill.
“Whenever I went to the bar, I found myself waiting for him,
wondering if he would ever return. Meanwhile, I was checking his
Facebook and giving him lots of ‘likes.’ He looked super busy. So when he
didn’t come back, I invited him out.”
“What a lucky man. What does he do for a living?” Kido saw
Misuzu’s hesitation. “That’s fine,” he said. “You don’t have to say. I was
only curious.”
 “It’s not his job that’s the issue . . . ,” she said. “He has a wife and
child. You may be surprised to hear this, but I’ve always had a no-married-
man policy.”
“I don’t see why that should surprise me.”
“I’m being serious here! I’m in my forties and I’m still single and here
I am, ready to stoop to that in the end . . . He’s not just busy. He seems to
have a rich, fulfilling life and he’s never shown any interest in me . . . To
tell you the truth, I’ve been a mess for the past six months. Such a mess that
I’ve been wondering what’s come over me—and at this age too!”
“. . . So?”
“Well . . . recently something happened, and I decided to use it as an
opportunity to get over him. That’s one of the reasons I quit working at the
bar. Waiting for him was just too painful. I used to say three steps forward
and four steps back, but lately I’ve been on a stepping backward streak.”
“Have you told him how you feel?”
Misuzu fluttered her long lashes restlessly like a water bird startled
into flight by a noise. Kido failed to grasp the meaning of her rapid
blinking, but when her lips drew momentarily into a faint, closed-mouth
smile, he smiled back in the same way and inquired no further.
I guess there’s another man just like me, he thought.

For a while after that, both of them were silent.

“If you have any work to do, don’t let me stop you,” said Misuzu.
“You go ahead and sleep if you like,” said Kido, reciprocating her
thoughtfulness. “I’ll wake you up when we arrive.”
“Can I ask you one thing?” she asked.
“By all means.”
“Why did that Makoto Hara guy masquerade as Daisuké? I can
understand that he would want to get rid of his family register. But what
was stopping him from making up a life story to his own liking? Wouldn’t
everything have been easier for him if he hadn’t gone around acting like the
story about the transplant and all was his? At least it seems that way to me.”
“I don’t doubt that some people hide their past with a yarn of their
own devising . . . but my suspicion is that he empathized with Daisuké-san,
much in the way we all do when reading novels or watching movies. It
takes a certain kind of talent to come up with a story that you not only like
but can project your emotions into. It’s not something that just anyone is
capable of—moreover, I think it’s important to confront yourself through
another. There is a certain kind of loneliness that can only be soothed by
finding yourself within the tale of another’s trauma.”
Kido noted that he was interpolating his own fascination with Makoto
Hara into what he was saying.
“Hmmm. I think I kind of get what you’re saying . . . but, like, there’s
the Daisuké I knew back in the day, the ‘Daisuké Taniguchi’ that started a
nice family in Miyazaki and died on the logging site, and then there’s the
life of the real, current Daisuké we’re about to meet . . . It’s weird.”
“I’m sure we all have an infinite number of possible futures. Only, it’s
difficult for each of us to realize what those are ourselves. I’m certainly no
exception. If I were to pass the baton to someone at this point, they might
be able to lead my life better than I ever would have.”
“It’s like when the president of a corporation is replaced. Or, like, the
coach of a soccer team.”
“That’s the way legal entities have been conceived since the days of
the Roman Empire. Even when the people changed, the nation remained the
same. Roman law, which is the foundation for present civil law,
presupposed the eternal continuation of the empire. But as it turned out,
Rome fell, while its laws have lived on . . .”
Kido realized he’d gone off on a tangent but, glancing at Misuzu,
found her listening with rapt attention.
“Ahem, anyhow, the situation is different with regard to individuals.
There is the human lifespan and death to factor in. Moreover, Hara-san is
not Daisuké-san.”
“But he’s not whoever Hara-san was before either, is he?”
“True . . . Perhaps his life merged with Daisuké-san’s or abides
alongside it—but if that is so, then when we fall for someone, what part of
them is it that we love, I wonder? When we meet a person who will become
our beloved, we are attracted to who they are in the present and grow to
love them as a whole, including their past. But if a lover finds out that their
beloved’s past is in fact the past of a stranger, what happens to the love the
two shared?”
 Misuzu looked at Kido as though the answer were obvious.
“Once the truth came out, they’d have to renew their love,” she said.
“I mean, it’s not as if you love someone once and that’s it. You renew your
love again and again over the long haul, through everything that happens
along the way.”
Misuzu’s conviction touched Kido, and he looked at her face, aglow
with a centered, sensitive calm, feeling overwhelming affection for her. He
was reminded of the ongoing influence her perspective had exerted over
him this past year, with its untrammeled, somewhat bitter resignation to
reality resulting from a certain obstinacy untainted by common opinion.
“Well put,” he said. “Love for another might remain the same love
even as it keeps on changing. Or perhaps we can go further and say that
love persists precisely because it changes.”
A voice over the intercom announced that they would be arriving
shortly at Nagoya. Kido was sad to think that this trip could be the last time
he saw Misuzu. He continued to reflect on her story about her recent
heartbreak, watching her in profile as she gazed out the window, pretending
that he too was taking in the scenery.
He was doing his best to appear obtuse and hold back from making
any moves on her, even while he mocked himself in his head for his lucky
misunderstanding of her confession. What he wanted was to make amends
with his wife. And he told himself that what Misuzu had said about
deciding to “get over him” ought to be taken at face value.
As they were both planning to return from Nagoya that day, neither
had brought large pieces of luggage, so there was no need to gather them up
before deboarding. Even so, they waited a long time to stand up, remaining
seated until just before the train stopped.
In a flash, the urge to stay on the train and go off somewhere with
Misuzu budded and then burgeoned in Kido’s chest, his pulse rising as
though anticipating that he would suggest it. But he considered what
Misuzu had said earlier with regard to Kyoichi: I’m getting older, and I’m
sure he wouldn’t get much out of it. He sympathized with her conundrum
even as he rebelled against the intent of the statement. I’m getting older too,
thought Kido. Perhaps neither of them would have got much out of it.
“Shall we?” said Kido. He was the one who stood first, so as to break
away from his lingering attraction to her. Misuzu turned to him and nodded
with her usual cheerful but languid expression. When Kido extended his
hand, she broke into a broad smile as she took it.
“Off we go,” she said, standing up. And pleased by his courtesy, she
thanked him in a way that left no doubt about her true feelings.
 CHAPTER TWENTY

The meeting with “Yoshihiko Sonézaki” was at one o’clock, so Kido and
Misuzu had a simple lunch at a restaurant inside the station building. They
then said goodbye for the moment, as the arrangement was for Kido to
interview the man one-on-one before Misuzu joined them.
The location the man had given them was a branch of Komeda’s
Coffee. It should have been only a ten-minute walk from Nagoya Station,
but as Kido was unfamiliar with the area and got quickly thrown off course
by the numerous other branches nearby, he ended up being about five
minutes late.
Assuming “Yoshihiko Sonézaki” was indeed Daisuké Taniguchi, Kido
knew his face from photos. Then again, as all the photos had been at least
ten years old, he wasn’t sure if he would recognize him immediately. When
he told one of the baristas that he was there to meet someone, she seemed to
have an idea who that might be and led him to the smoking area. There, at a
four-seater table divided from the one beside it by a movable wooden
partition, sat a man in a gray knit cap and an embroidered bomber jacket
that somehow didn’t suit him. He was looking Kido’s way. Kido let out a
silent sigh, and his heart throbbed rapidly just as when he had first heard the
man’s voice on Skype. While he had definitely aged, there was no
mistaking Daisuké Taniguchi.
He’s still alive.
Kido’s cheeks grew warm as though flushing when he thought how he
had hung on to his trust in Makoto Hara to the last. The combined stink of
coffee and cigarette smoke thickened the air. When Kido reached his seat,
he greeted the man and proffered his business card. Without a word, the
man bowed, wearing an expression of intense nervousness, and examined
both sides of the card.
“Daisuké Taniguchi?”
The man who was supposed to be “Yoshihiko Sonézaki” hesitated,
looking harrowed for a moment, before saying, “Yeah.”
In response to Kido’s smile, Daisuké twisted his cheeks involuntarily.
He was supposed to be forty-two, three years older than Kido, but his skin
was puffy and lusterless, his eyes exhausted.
Once Kido had ordered a coffee, Daisuké said, “Um, can you call me
Sonézaki? And do you mind if I smoke?”
“Go right ahead. Sonézaki-san it is. Apologies.”
Daisuké took a puff of his cigarette and, looking more relaxed, said,
“You kind of have to experience it yourself to understand what I mean, but
once a year goes by after you’ve swapped registers, you actually become a
different person. When you called me Daisuké Taniguchi, I was seriously
like, what, you mean me? Because along with our pasts, we switch
everything. Before the swap, I hated the Taniguchis. Now it’s like I never
even knew them. When I saw Kyoichi Taniguchi on Facebook, he just
looked like the goofy owner of some bumpkin inn.”
“You never think about the old days?”
“If you cut off your relationships and move to a different place, the
memories just fade naturally—I mean, if you hate your past, trying to forget
will get you nowhere. You can’t erase it. You’ve got to overwrite it. Cover it
over with someone else’s till it’s beyond recognition.”
When Kido’s coffee arrived, he took a sip, nodding to what Daisuké
was saying and realized that he had been mistaken about something. Taking
on a new identity didn’t seem to mean living the story of another’s trauma,
as Kido had imagined. At the same time, the impression this man gave him
was radically distinct from that of the Daisuké that Misuzu had described
on the train. When he looked at his face, Kido had no doubt that the man
was her ex, Kyoichi Taniguchi’s missing brother, but it was hard to think of
them as the same person, just as Daisuké himself had claimed.
“Sonézaki-san,” said Kido. “Where are you originally from?”
“A town in Yamaguchi Prefecture. I’m the son of a yakuza.”
“. . . I see. Did you . . . How can I put this? Were you aware who you
were exchanging registers with?”
 “You mean Makoto Hara?” To Kido’s surprise, Daisuké said this as
though he didn’t see why Kido was making a big deal out of it.
“Exactly. Was it Omiura that brokered the exchange?”
“Um, that might have been his name. Dude had a face like a blowfish
and this super shady vibe to him.”
“Oh, then, yes. That sounds like him.”
“He talked all kinds of crazy stuff, like, ‘I know a guy that lived to be
two hundred.’”
Kido burst out laughing and almost tilted his coffee onto the tabletop.
“He told me three hundred.”
Daisuké smirked, finally beginning to warm up. “What’s he doing
now?”
“Serving time.”
“Really? For what?”
“He was convicted for a scam.”
Daisuké closed one eye and exhaled smoke as though he was really
enjoying it.
“Did you know about Hara-san’s early days?” Kido asked.
“Yup. Father was that killer, right?”
“He was. So Hara-san changed his family register twice? First he
became Yoshihiko Sonézaki and then—”
“He swapped with me.”
“Why did he trade twice?”
“Why? It was pretty normal in that scene. Actually, someone like me
who only did one swap is more in the minority.”
“Is that right?”
“Hara-san’s past was intense, so Sonézaki was pretty much his only
choice for a swap partner. I don’t think it bothered Hara-san that Sonézaki
was the child of a gangster. The problem was when they met in person.
Because Hara-san just didn’t like the guy.”
Kido saw the pieces of the story coming together at last, realizing that
it must have been this man, the original Sonézaki, who foisted Hara’s
register on defenseless Tashiro.
“The family register for ‘Daisuké Taniguchi’ was a hot item,” said
Daisuké, fiddling with a hundred-yen lighter in his right hand. “No criminal
record, a real clean past. Actually, it was so popular that one guy kept
trading for better and better registers trying to land mine, like the Straw
Millionaire in that legend. At the time, I didn’t care about anything but
cutting off my family. I would have swapped with just about anyone. But I
drew the line at a criminal record and I didn’t want some thug who might
cook up a scheme to get the Taniguchi estate. Then I met Hara-san and we
talked a bunch and I thought my old identity might help him turn over a
new leaf.”
“Did Hara-san empathize with Daisuké Taniguchi’s past?”
“I’d say so. He listened carefully to my story, said he wanted to do his
best to make the most of what remained of my life. If I was going to give
away my life, I wanted it to be to someone like that. We only met twice, but
I liked him. There was this pureness in his eyes, and he seemed like a really
nice guy, even after everything he went through. I could almost taste how
badly he wanted to jump ship before his time in this world came to an end.”
“So, when you met him, Hara-san would have been going by
‘Yoshihiko Sonézaki,’ is that right? Was he the one who told you about his
original life?”
“Yeah, sure. How he used to be a boxer. Made two suicide attempts.”
“Two?”
“That’s what he said.”
It seemed that Hara had come around to admitting his “fall” from his
apartment was a suicide attempt. But Kido had never suspected there had
been a second one. “How do you think he made a living after he quit
boxing?”
“Um, worked in restaurants, all kinds of places. Then information
about him started to spread online, and it got harder and harder for him. Did
temp work for a while after that.”
As Kido watched Daisuké answer so coolly about Hara, he recalled all
the times he had worried that the man might have killed Daisuké since he’d
taken on Rié’s case more than a year ago.
“And what are you doing now?” he asked.
“Um . . . this and that. Does it matter?”
“Excuse me for prying.”
“No worries.”
“I just thought that you might encounter obstacles as the child of a
gangster.”
 “It’s not like I go around telling people about it. How do you think real
yakuza kids go straight-edge? They keep it under wraps.”
“Right.”
“Just once I told someone who I was, a coworker at one of our bar
nights, because he was a real prick. My family is one of the big crime
syndicates, so I gave him the name. That douche’s whole attitude toward
me has been different ever since. In a way, it’s almost like a source of
confidence for me now, I mean, when I think how I was born to this really
badass family but that I’m hiding it so I can try to live honestly.”
“I could see that.”
“That’s why I say I’m not the same me as I used to be—the truth is, I
never met the real Sonézaki-san, so I can’t picture him directly. I base him
on Hara-san. I start by imagining what Hara-san might have been like if he
was the son of a yakuza and build up my past from there. There’s even a
period when I used to be a boxer.”
Kido flashed a complicated smile. “Apparently, Hara-san had some
real talent for boxing. He won the East Japan Rookie King Tournament.”
“Seriously? Wow. He never mentioned that . . . though now, I guess
he’s . . .”
“He’s passed away.”
“What a shame . . . Though I do feel kind of relived to know that
Daisuké is gone. I wanted Hara-san to keep on living Daisuké for me, but it
also kind of creeped me out whenever I remembered that the second son of
that family was still out there, alive somewhere.”
“On that topic, you should know that the facts have come to light and
Daisuké Taniguchi’s notification of death has been annulled. Officially, he’s
a missing person listed as living.”
“What? Really?” Daisuké made a sour face and looked as though he
were reconsidering the meaning of Hara’s death. “What did Hara-san get
himself into after he took over being Daisuké?”
Kido briefly related Hara’s life from the time he met Rié in Town S
until he died. Daisuké solemnly chain-smoked with crossed arms as he
listened. When Kido mentioned that Hara had had a kid, Daisuké opened
his eyes wide and faced the ceiling, lost in thought.
“So was his wife hot?”
 “Pardon? Ahem, well, I suppose you could say that she’s cute. With
nice, round eyes.”
“Isn’t that something. Damn. Lucky guy . . . If I’d ended up in Town
S, I wonder if I’d have married her too.”
“Well, hmmm . . . it’s hard to say.”
“I feel bad for him that he died young. But actually I’m kind of jealous
that he managed to start a happy family . . . Damn. I guess I blew it.”
“Are you married?”
“Not going to happen. I’m broke.”
“You wouldn’t consider going back to the Taniguchis? There is the
estate, and I hear your mother wants to see you. For the legal problems, I
could—”
“No way!” snapped Daisuké, flinging the lighter he’d been holding
onto the table. “If you’re going to talk about that, then I’m outta here.”
Kido apologized and merely gave a general explanation of inheritance
rights, but Daisuké had no focus for it.
“Even if I become homeless, I will never meet with the people in that
family. Whatever the census records might say, can’t we let ‘Daisuké
Taniguchi’ rest in his grave? Misuzu is the only exception. I can’t tell you
how long I’ve wished that I could see her again. When I imagine myself on
my deathbed and think who I’d want to be there, it’s her. Just her. That
scene keeps popping into my head. Pretty dumb, I know. You met her,
didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“Is she still hot? Not over the hill?”
“She’ll be here in fifteen minutes. She’s as beautiful as ever.”
“Is she married?”
“You’d better ask her that yourself.”
“So she’s single, then. Damn! . . . Misuzu is by far the hottest
girlfriend I have ever had. Most of my memories of ‘Daisuké’ are just
barely hanging on, but not the ones of dating her. Those still come back to
me all the time—like when we were in the bedroom and stuff . . .”
Daisuké gave Kido a depressingly lecherous smile.
Now Kido wondered if the two brothers, Daisuké and Kyoichi,
however different they appeared on the surface, might in fact be two of a
kind, though Daisuké didn’t seem to have been like this when he was dating
Misuzu . . . So perhaps the change was due to the “confidence” he now
derived from being the child of a yakuza. Or perhaps some part of him was
unconsciously mimicking his elder brother. Whatever the reason, Kido
sensed a kind of psychological deterioration in the man, resulting no doubt
from his unfortunate circumstances and irreducible to his innate character.
He regrets what he’s chosen, Kido thought. Daisuké had the look of an
amateur investor who has just learned that a share he had put aside for more
bullish times and finally sold off at a loss has just gone up in value. While
his unwavering aversion to ever seeing the Taniguchis again came off as
genuine, he seemed to wish that he had thought more carefully about the
swap and chosen a life on par with the one he’d started out with. Until now,
Kido had felt slightly jealous when he imagined Misuzu and Daisuké’s
reunion, but realized that he had let his feelings cloud his good sense. The
intervening decade had opened a gap between them that he should have
anticipated, especially considering that Daisuké had been living the life of
another.
As Daisuké’s salacious words and Misuzu’s story about Kyoichi’s
unflagging desire entangled in his mind, Kido felt profoundly disturbed. At
the same time, he sympathized with Daisuké for the situation that had made
him run away from the Taniguchis and was filled with sorrow at the thought
of Hara’s single-minded adoption of that past as his own.
Kido’s cell phone chimed: Misuzu was on her way. Now he wondered
if the imminent reunion might bring about some shift in Daisuké. Whether
Misuzu would be painfully disillusioned or inspired to extend a helping
hand, Kido couldn’t guess. Perhaps she would “renew” her love for him—
whatever might happen, Kido didn’t think he could bear to watch it unfold.
He had been planning to stay but now reconsidered, deciding it was none of
his concern.
“Goto-san says she’ll be here shortly, so I’m going to take my leave
now,” said Kido with a bow.
“Oh. You’re going?”
“Yes. I kind of have plans after this.”
“Alright. Damn. Now I’m nervous . . . I was feeling jumpy at first
with you too. I was worried I might regret coming. But I’m really glad we
could meet. It gave me a chance to ask everything that was on my mind.”
 Daisuké extended his hand, and Kido reached out to shake it, recalling
the touch of Misuzu’s hand a short time earlier. Daisuké’s was rough and
clammy. Kido wondered who that texture belonged to. Seven years ago,
when Hara showed up as Sonézaki and left as Daisuké, did he shake hands
and part with this man in just the same way? Imagining that interaction play
by play through Hara’s eyes, Kido paid the bill and walked quickly out of
the café.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

After meeting with Daisuké and interviewing him about his register swap
with Hara, Kido finished the report for Rié. While there was more he would
have liked to know about Hara, he felt it important, for the time being at
any rate, to put his investigation to rest after a year and three months
pursuing it.
As Kaori had requested, Kido made an appointment with a
psychologist at a clinic near his workplace. But because Kido took a
professional interest in the way the psychologist asked questions, it ended
up turning into a lively conversation in which Kido inquired about the finer
details of the technique. And although the psychologist said he would be
glad to have him back, Kido never returned.
Kaori was relieved to hear that he had followed through but endlessly
put off going herself. For his part, Kido didn’t force the issue. Ever since
their talk, he’d observed a change in her and saw her scolding Sota to tears
much less often. She wasn’t necessarily making such changes
spontaneously, but he sensed her effort and her desire to rehabilitate the
situation at home. And he wanted to reciprocate by cooperating with her as
much as he could, especially in light of his newfound understanding of the
psychological burden she bore due to the earthquake and the ensuing spread
of xenophobia. He felt guilty for having been insensitive to what she was
going through and, at the same time, grateful.
Kido has remained unwavering in this perspective on their relationship
even to this day. This is why events like the following, which occurred three
days before he went back to see Rié, have already never happened for him,
becoming just another memory of a typical weekend, hardly worth
recalling. Some people may find this state of mind incomprehensible, while
others will no doubt feel that they can almost relate.

One morning, Kido and his family went to the Tokyo Skytree, which Sota
had been wanting to visit for some time. They arrived at eleven o’clock
after riding trains on the Toyoko and then Hanzomon lines.
Two years had passed since the Skytree opened to the public, and they
expected the mobs of eager tourists to have mostly dissipated. But this
turned out to be naive, especially since it was a spring weekend, and they
were told they’d have to wait two hours just to receive a number to then line
up for a ticket.
Outside the windows stretched a clear, radiantly blue sky.
Kido gazed at it, relishing his day off.
Suddenly a line from a story he had read long ago flitted through his
mind.
“Ah, such a moment of such a day,” the character had exclaimed. This
expressed how he felt right then perfectly, but the name of the writer
refused to come to him.
“What should we do?” Kaori asked Sota with a smile. Although she
had been out drinking with her coworkers the previous night and had
returned home well after Kido was asleep, she showed no signs of a
hangover and had been in a good mood all morning. “Want to line up?”
Biting his thumbnail, Sota looked his mother in the eye and squirmed
as he weighed the options.
“Let’s go to the aquarium,” he said eventually.
Kido checked to make sure that that was what he actually wanted to
do. Sota had learned to be attentive to what the adults around him were
feeling and to adapt himself to them. Kido wasn’t sure if this was typical for
his age or if he was just unusually considerate.
“Yeah. Let’s go,” said Sota, tugging Kido’s arm.
So instead of going up to the observation deck, they decided that they
would content themselves by merely looking up at the Skytree from the
base. Kido then told Kaori his honest impression of the building, the tallest
in Japan.
 “From a distance, it just looked like some overgrown lattice tower,
with no redeeming qualities of any kind. And now that I’m finally up close,
it impresses me even less than I was expecting.”
“So true,” Kaori agreed, smiling again.
The aquarium was in the same building. On the way there, Sota
begged them to let him buy a toy in a capsule from a hand-cranked vending
machine, so Kido gave him some change and Sota ended up with a
miniature samurai helmet and armor. When they arrived, they found the
aquarium lobby crowded as well but with a much shorter line. The closest
comparison Kido could think of for this aquarium was the Hakkeijima Sea
Paradise theme park, which the three of them had visited together. None of
them had ever been here before.
Under dim lighting done in contemporary style for couples on dates,
Sota hopped his way through the crowd. But despite this apparent
excitement, he didn’t even glance at the jellyfish, minnows, or anything else
that he passed, and when Kido tried picking him up to show him the sea
otters in a tank higher off the floor than the others, Sota immediately said,
“I’m done.”
Presently they came to a tank for viewing sharks and manta rays. It
made a grand display, akin to the massive screens in new cinema
multiplexes, and the wall of spectators signalled that this was the main
attraction. Here too, Sota showed little interest, saying, “It’s scary,” before
hurrying right by. At this, Kido shared a look with Kaori and grinned in
dismay.
Next they came to the penguin zone, where a blue tank with artificial
boulders could be viewed from above as though looking down on a big
pool. This design seemed to finally thrill Sota, and they went down a floor
to watch the penguins swimming underwater at eye level. Looking only at
the shadows cast on the floor by the whole group in motion, they resembled
birds in flight. From below, the surface of the water churned relentlessly,
crushing the light pouring from the ceiling.
For the most part, the penguins all travelled in the same direction, but
Kido was captivated by the way a few birds would inevitably break away,
head deeper, and shoot off diagonally in the opposite direction until the
entire group eventually switched. When he came to, he realized that Sota
and Kaori were gone. He then wandered about the penguin zone searching
for them to no avail. Giving Kaori a call, he learned that they were in the
souvenir shop near the exit and went to meet them, slightly annoyed.
“Daddy! You lost your mommy!” Sota cried the moment he saw him,
jumping in uproarious laughter as though it were the funniest thing in the
world. When Kido gave him a scowl, it only made Sota laugh harder. Kaori
explained that she’d been hoping to buy Sota some kind of souvenir. As
they found nothing he wanted after thoroughly perusing the wares on offer,
they decided to try a different store after lunch.

All the restaurants on the restaurant floors had dauntingly long lines, except
for one on floor seven that specialized in beers from around the world.
Once they had confirmed that the menu was child friendly, they decided to
go inside.
Kido was surprised to find that, despite the lack of seating everywhere
else, the server led them to a table close to the windows. And as he gazed
out at the blue sky sheltering vast stretches of Tokyo buildings, with the
Imperial Palace in the distance, he felt that the vista here was more than
sufficient without having to go all the way to the top of the Skytree.
When the three of them sat down, they all sighed with relief. After
walking around for an hour and a half, not to mention the long train ride,
they were pleasantly tired out. The restaurant bustled with families and
couples talking in voices made loud by the alcohol. Kido noted that they
wouldn’t need to worry about disturbing other patrons if Sota couldn’t sit
still.
For Sota, they ordered an orange juice and the kid’s lunch that came
with a hamburger patty and rice, and for the adults, spareribs and a salad.
Kido asked for a Chimay white and Kaori a rare German pilsner the name
of which they could not pronounce. The drinks came immediately and the
three of them said cheers. Kido drank a third of his glass in one gulp and let
out a long, relaxed breath as though he were soaking in fresh bathwater
before anyone else had taken their turn.
“It tastes even better when you haven’t had it in a while,” said Kido
when the Chimay’s complex fruity bitterness had spread across his palate.
He then quaffed another third and held in a burp.
 Imitating his father, Sota took a gulp of juice and said, “Whew. It
tastes fantastic when you haven’t had it in a while,” before laughing wildly.
Kido and Kaori laughed along with him.
“Want to try some?” said Kaori, proffering her glass to Kido. “This
one’s pretty good too.”
Kido took a sip.
“It is good,” he said, nodding as he examined the aftertaste. “Goes
down smooth.”
The salad arrived, followed, after an inordinate wait, by the spareribs.
The all-important kid’s lunch was nowhere to be seen. They tried to feed
Sota some of the ribs, but after one bite he complained that it was too salty
and returned the piece of meat, fork and all, to the plate.
“Hey, Mom, let me play games on your phone.”
Reluctantly, Kaori pulled up the puzzle game that Sota liked and
handed him her phone. By this time, Kido had finished most of his second
Chimay as an accompaniment to the richly flavored meat and was feeling
increasingly chipper now that he was tipsy.
“Sorry. Can I have that back for a second?” Kaori asked Sota as she
stood up from her seat.
Sota didn’t seem to hear her, mesmerized by the screen.
Kaori wavered for a moment about whether to insist, but decided to let
him keep the phone and left for the restroom.
“Your lunch is taking forever,” Kido said, and suddenly thought of that
one night two winters ago, after he had gone to Shibuya to meet with
Kyoichi for the first time. He recalled the intense feeling of happiness he
had experienced as he put Sota to bed in his room and told himself that he
was happy in the present moment as well.
I wonder if there’s a life out there that someone is about to part with
that I might be able to lead better . . . If I were to hand off my life to
someone right now, would he be able to lead the remainder of my life better
than me? Just as Hara seems to have realized a more beautiful future than
Daisuké probably ever would have . . .
Being “normal” had been Hara’s great aspiration and Kido mulled
over the meaning of that notion, contemplating all the pain and relief it
must have caused people. Then he studied Sota as he stared downward and
operated the touch screen adroitly with his small fingers. He noted how
similar his features and personality were to Kido’s when he was a child.
From the perspective of natural selection, was it more advantageous for the
child to resemble the parent? Was it because of such resemblance that the
parent raised the child with great care, as though they were the parent
themselves? Quickly Kido thought up innumerable counterexamples, such
as parents who lovingly raise their adopted children, and immediately
dropped his hypothesis. Though it was true that Sota’s resemblance to Kido
overjoyed him, it was not beyond the realm of possibility that the
resemblance could one day bring Sota anguish.
I must live properly, Kido thought and, imagining himself making the
decision to give up his son, felt as though his heart might split apart in his
chest. The remorse would surely be torturous if I did that. Just as it was for
Daisuké—even Daisuké’s life might not have attained such enviable
happiness if anyone other than Hara had picked it up.
Kido downed the dregs of his beer and chewed his lip, feeling even
more attached to his present life. He pictured how excited he would have
been if he had been born Makoto Hara and taken his life over from a man
named Akira Kido. Then he might have been leading his present life anew
as though he had taken it over from someone else, a stranger to himself at
each instant . . .
“Hey, Dad, is my food here yet?”
“No. This is taking much too long. I’ll let them know again.”
Kido stopped a waitress who was frantically carrying off empty
glasses and asked once more that they hurry up. Out of the blue, he realized
that he never properly answered Sota’s question that night about why
Narcissus became a narcissus flower. Sota himself had likewise forgotten
about it, but now that Kido had remembered, he made a note on his phone
to look it up later.
Sitting at the neighboring table was a married couple with a girl of
about two and a baby boy of about five months. The baby had burst into
tears, and the mother was hurriedly mixing formula for him.
“Excuse the disturbance,” the father said, bowing apologetically to
Kido, who was staring at them absentmindedly.
“No, no, not at all.”
“It’s hard to get him to stop crying once he gets going.”
“That’s entirely normal.”
 Kido smiled and turned his gaze back to Sota, who remained absorbed
in his game. For a five-year-old boy, he seemed to have grown a lot. Rié’s
second child had never lived that long. She had endured the sorrow of his
death. Kido doubted that he would have been able to bear it. Kaori had still
not returned.
“Huh?” said Sota suddenly. “Dad, there’s a weird screen.”
The phone Sota held out to Kido showed an ad for a different game.
“Aha,” said Kido. “You must have pressed something by mistake.”
Then, just as Kido was tapping the screen to return to the game, a
banner appeared at the top of the display. It was a Line notification for an
incoming message. And although Kido had no intention of looking, it
entered his field of vision: sprinkled around the words “Last Night” were
emoji hearts in the style of children’s stickers. Involuntarily, Kido gently
swiped it away with his thumb as though brushing dust off something
fragile. The name of the sender, Kaori’s boss, remained in his head after the
message had disappeared. Even so, there was no reason for him to suppose
that the event had moved beyond his brain’s region for short-term memory.
And, thankfully, it must have therefore vanished without a trace, like
anything else that does not need to be remembered.
When the display went black, Kido placed the phone screen-down on
the table as though nothing had happened.
“Dad! I want to play more.”
“That’s all for now, son. Look, your lunch just arrived. Better eat up.”
“Oh . . . Can I play more when I’m done eating?”
“Ask your mother.”
Kido finished his lukewarm Chimay and ordered another from the
waitress. Eventually Kaori returned.
“The line for the women’s room was just awful—oh, it came. That’s
the kid’s lunch?”
“Yup, they just brought it over. Just when I was getting sick of
waiting.”
“Is that your third drink? Are you OK? Can you make it home?”
“I’ll make it back just fine. It’s only beer.”
Kido smiled and reached out to cut up Sota’s hamburger patty into
smaller pieces.
 The baby at the neighboring table had finally gotten his formula and
was sucking it from the bottle in a trance.
Outside the windows stretched a clear, radiantly blue sky.
Kido gazed at it, relishing his day off.
Suddenly a line from a story he had read long ago flitted through his
mind.
“Ah, such a moment of such a day,” the character had exclaimed. This
expressed how he felt right then perfectly.
Motojiro Kaji’s “In a Castle Town,” he thought, smacking his knee
softly so as not to make a sound as he finally remembered where it had
come from and withdrew his glass slowly from his lips.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

During the almost two-hour flight from Haneda Airport, Kido gazed
outside, engrossed in his own world of thought.
It was April, the spring weather uplifting, and his chest stirred in
anticipation of the even greater warmth that surely awaited him in
Miyazaki. As his window faced north, the light was bright without being
dazzling. He could see expanses of blue sky at eye level, faint clouds
veiling the giant map-like form of the Japanese archipelago like delicate
lace.
In a stroke of good luck, the seats beside him were empty, allowing
him to relax in solitude. When the plane stabilized and the seatbelt sign
winked out, Kido reclined his seat slightly and began to turn the pages of
his carry-on reading material, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It was the bunko
edition put out by Iwanami. He had bought it at a bookstore after searching
the web in an effort to complete his newly remembered homework from
two Christmases ago.
As there seemed to be several competing theories about the myth of
Narcissus, Kido wanted a primary resource and had settled on
Metamorphoses because online comments made it out to be the simplest
and most thorough way to learn Greco-Roman myths. But once he cracked
the cover, he was immediately puzzled by the immensely intricate symbolic
world that unfolded, and lost all hope of explaining it to Sota. Still, the book
was captivating in its own right, and he continued to read it for pleasure.

According to Ovid, Narcissus was conceived when the river god Cephissus
entangled “azure Liriope the water nymph” in his “winding streams” and
“offered violence to her when enclosed by his waters.” Kido was amazed to
learn the secret of Narcissus’s birth, and felt, in light of it, that there was
more to the significance of his obsession with staring motionless at water
than simple self-love. Rather, for Narcissus, water was at once his parents
and the altercation between them, an act of violence that should never have
occurred but without which he never would have existed. That is, Narcissus
had to look at his origin if he was to see himself, as incapable of erasing the
past as he was of reconnecting or returning to it.
The myth of Narcissus was, of course, a story of unrequited love. We
find Narcissus “burning with the love of himself,” and Echo, a nymph from
the utterly foreign domain of the mountains, falling in love with him as
well. Echo has been cursed by the goddess Juno so that she can only speak
by “redoubling the end of speech” and repeating the words of those she
hears.
The result of this dynamic is that Narcissus, only seeing his own
reflection, is incapable of loving anyone but himself, while Echo, only
echoing the voice of others, is incapable of making her love aware of her
existence. Thus, Narcissus is trapped in a world of one from which Echo is
permanently barred. It isn’t until the moment of Narcissus’s death that this
lonesome pair fleetingly bridges their isolation, re-echoing each other’s
voices with the lament, “Alas!” and a final farewell.
When poor Narcissus heard the “youth, beloved in vain” reflected in
the water repeat his cry of lamentation, did he experience joy at long last?
And what about Echo?! Could that cry and salutation be unique for her,
insofar as they were Narcissus’s words, while simultaneously being the very
words that she truly wanted to say in those moments?
The myth stirred up various ruminations for Kido. The last of these—
as he read the passage where Narcissus screams, “Oh! Would that I could
depart from my own body!” upon realizing that the reflection is of himself
—was that it related to Hara. For both Narcissus and Hara had wanted to
depart from their bodies. If this had been possible for Narcissus, he would
have been able to love himself, whereas Hara wanted to become someone
else, to love another, and to be loved by that other. And yet ultimately,
perhaps, by becoming a stranger, Hara too had sought a way to love himself
from the very beginning—to love not just the proper noun “Makoto Hara”
but the person that should have been.
Sunlight pouring in through the southward windows crossed the aisle and
struck Kido’s face, dazzling him. Presently, he was shielded by a flight
attendant rolling the service cart. Kido ordered a coffee. Then, removing the
plastic lid to take a whiff of the aroma and a small sip, he gazed out the
window once again at the blue sky and the fine motions of the wing as he
returned to his pondering.
True to the title, Metamorphoses, the book contained all manner of
transformation tales, but nowhere did Kido find an answer to Sota’s simple
question about why Narcissus transforms. Kido recalled the tragic god
Phaethon, who, losing control of his father Helios’s brilliant sun chariot,
veered toward the earth and might have burned it to cinders if Jupiter had
not pierced him through with a thunderbolt. His sisters, the Heliades, the
daughters of the sun, wailed endlessly in grief over his death before turning
into trees and leaving beautiful amber tears. Then there was the hero
Actaeon, who, rousing the fury of the forest goddess Diana merely by
happening to see her bathing, was changed into a stag and mauled to death
by his own dogs not recognizing their master. And chaste Daphne, who,
pursued by Apollo after he is struck by Cupid’s arrow, bemoans her own
beauty and transforms into a laurel tree.
Allowing these myths to meander through his mind, arising as they
came to him and passing away, Kido thought of not just Hara but the whole
multitude who had exchanged their family registers through Omiura.
Perhaps they too, like such mythical figures—whether in the throes of
sorrow, driven by desperation, or pressured by others—had been forced to
transform into a different being, some finding love and happiness, others
tumbling further from grace.

As the plane made its approach to Miyazaki and began to descend, clouds
multiplied as though the clear skies since their takeoff in Tokyo had never
been. Raindrops struck the window, streaking past on their myriad thin
trajectories. By the time they landed, it was overcast and drizzly but warm.
Just as on his previous visit, Kido rented a car at the airport, checked in to
his hotel in Miyazaki City, and had lunch.
It wasn’t strictly necessary for him to come all this way. While he did
want to discuss his report with Rié in person rather than simply email it to
her, even that wasn’t the whole reason. He had also felt an irrepressible
desire to visit again. In this way, he hoped to find closure.
Although his appointment with Rié wasn’t until the following day, he
had arranged to arrive early so as to meet someone else that afternoon: Ito,
president of the eponymous Ito Lumber. Kido had asked Rié for an
introduction because he was curious to see where Hara used to work. Ito
was initially guarded when Kido contacted him. He seemed suspicious of
his motives. So Kido, rather than contrive an elaborate excuse that might
backfire and come off as fishy, had told him simply that he was interested in
forestry. This seemed to put Ito at ease, and he had agreed to show him
around some of the mountains where his company did its logging.

As the worksite was unreachable without four-wheel drive, Ito had arranged
to pick Kido up at the branch of Miyazaki City Hall in the town of
Kiyotake. When Kido parked his rented car and stepped out into the parking
lot, Ito immediately called out to him in a resonant voice that seemed to
come from the pit of his belly.
“Kido-sensei?”
A stocky man with a buzzcut, he wore pale sunglasses and held an
umbrella against the rain. Kido greeted him, presented his business card,
and handed him a box of sweets he’d brought from Tokyo.
“Well, look at that,” said Ito, appearing deeply appreciative. “How
kind of you.”
Ito explained that the mountain was about forty minutes away. While
the site they would visit wasn’t the one where Hara had died, it was very
similar and relatively close to it.
Once they were on the road, Kido reiterated his purpose in brief,
namely that he had grown intrigued with forestry while working on behalf
of Rié to sort out the estate of Daisuké Taniguchi. (Kido had grown used to
calling him Hara in his head but knew the man was still known as Daisuké
around here.) As Kido had various sorts of clients, whenever he met
someone in a rare line of work, he liked to familiarize himself with it as
best he could. While it wasn’t clear from Ito’s expression whether he
bought this explanation, he nodded affably as Kido spoke, saying, “Wow.
You don’t say.”
While Ito’s face was dark and forbidding, he was highly personable,
both talkative and candid. Playing FM radio on a low volume, he started off
by talking generally about forestry to feel out Kido’s interest level. As he
soon explained, the main business of Ito Lumber was logging national
forests, for which they purchased the rights, and they were booked up for
the next two years. Although the industry relied on government subsidies
and it was difficult to compete with imported materials, all wood was
saleable now that biomass generators had been constructed, and the market
was, if not booming, in decent shape.
“You may find this of interest as a lawyer. A few cut-rate crews have
jumped in on the game recently. Some of them log illegally and get up to all
sorts of wily tricks.”
“Oh my.”
“These days, no one wants mountain land even if they inherit it, so
claim holders have been multiplying like rabbits, and now there are these
spots here and there where no one can say for sure who owns what
anymore. These rotten crews will buy a small plot right beside the
mountain. Then they chop and haul all the trees where the owner is in
question.”
Ito spoke as though this was supposed to be amusing, and Kido
couldn’t help smiling even as he said, “How awful.”
“It’s a problem for the whole industry. Something’s got to be done.
Now and then we look at family registers to check the owner of old
mountain land, but it’s just a big mess, with claims branching off this way
and that.”
“I could see that.” Kido suspected that by “family register” Ito meant
to say “register book” but wasn’t in the mood to quibble. He wondered
whether Hara had had such conversations with Ito.
The surrounding houses gradually thinned out until soon they turned
onto an unpaved mountain road surrounded by groves.
 “It’s going to get a bit bumpy . . . Did you see those old wooden
houses in the area we just passed? Most of those have been forestry
households since olden times.”
“Is that right.”
Though entering the mountain probably had little to do with it, the rain
grew suddenly more intense, the wipers hurried. Despite the tree cover that
surrounded them, there was a gap in the canopy above from which light
shone down. The overgrown branches of low thickets occasionally tickled
the windshield, and every time the car swayed, wings of mud flapped out as
though startled from beneath the tires. There was something adventurous in
the vibration coming up through Kido’s seat. Through the drenched
windows, only the base of the straight-towering cryptomeria emerged from
the mist. Beyond the tips of those trees, as they drove along the steep road,
all that should have awaited, if not for the haze, was the sky. As they went
up and down the rises of the terrain, a vista would open up occasionally,
and in the distance far below, Kido would spot what appeared to be a
section of road they had passed a short time ago, surprised how high they
had already climbed.
“Do you work in the rain?” Kido asked.
“If it’s like this, sure. But there can be accidents when it pours. So we
hold off or else we cut it short.”
Kido recalled Rié telling him that there had been a torrential
downpour when Hara visited her shop for the second time, and now
supposed that his work must have been cancelled.
“Oh hell. That’s not the way you treat a site. Just look at that mess.
How they left the stumps. We would never do something like that. It’s an ill
bird that fouls its own nest. You’ve got to leave them tidy—almost there
now.”
“Once it turns dark, I imagine the roads around here are pretty scary.
Very narrow, especially when there are oncoming cars like that one a
moment ago.”
“Roads can get a heck of a lot worse than this with the steeper sites. I
won’t buy the really tricky ones. I’m too worried about accidents, not to
mention the efficiency is bad and the take-home is slim.”
“Makes sense.”
 After that, they were silent for a while until Ito spoke suddenly in a
quiet voice.
“I keep beating myself up for what happened to Taniguchi-kun. I still
pray in front of the altar every morning. I never saw a single big accident
since I took over the company from my old man. It tears me up inside to
think about it . . . That was the one time I took on a site with poor
conditions. The client was someone I just couldn’t refuse.”
“Is that how it happened . . . ? Occupational accidents are common in
forestry.”
“Yeah, incredibly common. One in a hundred. Not just the logging but
machines slipping off cliffs. Also snakes and wasps and that.”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought of all that.”
“When my grandpa was in charge, we had some laborers of Korean
stock come work here too.”
Kido’s jaw fell open in surprise at this unexpected shift in topic, but
Ito didn’t seem to notice and said nothing more about it.
“What were the circumstances of Taniguchi-san’s death?”
“I wasn’t on site at the time . . . It’s tough, reading which way a tree is
going to fall, no matter how seasoned you get. Especially when they’re
bent. Then they can really trip you up. I tell those boys every morning till
their ears fall off to be careful above all else.”
Ito sounded distraught, and Kido gave him a slight nod, waiting for
him to regain his composure. Though Kido didn’t look over, he could tell
somehow that the man was holding back tears. It was another vivid
demonstration of how deeply Hara’s friends mourned his death—whether
they had known him in his guise as Daisuké or, like the president of the
boxing club, by his real name—and Kido sensed the lingering wound in
their hearts. Not a single soul spoke badly of him.
Presently a parked car came into view, then a blue tarp, stacks of
wood.
“Here we are,” said Ito. He did a prodigious parking job, leaving just
enough room for another car to barely squeeze by, and stepped out of the
car, unfurling his umbrella. “It’s dangerous if you go too far ahead, so better
not stray too far from here.”
As Ito said this, he led Kido to the site entrance. Past an open space
cleared of trees that was wide enough to accommodate a truck was a
machine with a long orange neck that resembled a crane. It was clamping
on to logs one by one, lifting them, and scraping off their branches. Kido
could make out about three figures on site and, sweeping his gaze farther
on, saw a flat stretch of stumps, beyond which his view ended at a steep
slope.
“Approximately how old are the trees?” he asked.
“I’d say we cut them at about fifty. After that, they become building
materials and last another fifty as a house. So I think of each tree in terms of
about a hundred years. Fifty years on the mountain and fifty years with
people. That’s what I tell our workers too.”
“Makes sense. I hadn’t thought about it like that . . .”
“This way. Watch your step. Over there—we’re not doing any logging
today on account of the weather. Just jobs like this. Like other industries,
everything in forestry is mechanized these days. The heat and the cold take
their toll, but the work has gotten much easier on the body. I’m not saying
it’s a walk in the park, though.”
“Did Taniguchi-san operate machines too?”
“He sure did. It takes about three years before you’re fully trained in
this industry. The government provides a training subsidy called the Green
Employment program. Taniguchi-kun learned the whole job in about
eighteen months. He was very diligent, decisive too. On the scrawny side
but with surprising stamina.”
“Did he do some kind of exercise?”
“No. I don’t think he had any interest in sports. He said that he
practiced kendo when he was a child. As a matter of fact, since I have a dan
in kendo myself, we used to joke around about us having a showdown.”
At Ito’s wistful reminiscence, Kido nodded with a slight smile, hiding
his surprise at how meticulously Hara had assumed Daisuké’s past without
the slightest tweak. For, from what Kido gathered, Daisuké had received
instruction in kendo as a young child.
“He used to draw pictures a lot. During lunch break and that. Not that
he had a gift for it or anything.” Ito smiled.
“His widow showed them to me,” said Kido.
“Huh, you don’t say. They were very honest pictures. Very Taniguchi.
The personality you were born with really shows in things like that.”
“Yes . . .”
 “Oh. Excuse me a moment.” Ito accepted a call on his phone and
began to walk off. “Yes, hello? Oh, thanks. The other day! Yes . . .”
Alone, Kido gazed at a thicket of rain-soaked cryptomeria for a time.
All was quiet. In the silence between the huge globs of rain striking his
umbrella and the ground, the sound of his breathing grew crisp. The mist-
whitened verdure was imbued with pale light seeping down through the
clouds, the mountains overlapping indistinctly into the distance, no sign
anywhere that the gloom might break.
Imagining what might have been going through Hara’s head each day
as he gripped the chainsaw, Kido slipped into a reverie. He thought of the
fifty years it took for a cryptomeria to reach maturity. Was Hara aware of
the fifty years that Ito had said would follow? The trees that Hara cut had
been planted by someone generations earlier, and the trees that Hara planted
would be cut by someone generations to come. In the midst of this
unfolding time, did he contemplate the duration from his birth until that
moment? No, what probably occupied his mind was the desire to finish
work early, to see Rié and the kids. When he put the two children to bed
after a hard day’s work, stretching his depleted body on the futon beside
them, he must have felt that he was truly happy, all his many past ordeals
only adding immediacy and power to the experience . . .
Kido floated into a kind of rapture in which all traces of who he was
were lost. When he closed his eyes, time eased to a stop, and he hung his
head in the rain, waiting in perpetual speechlessness. He didn’t know
whether minutes were passing or hours.
Upon opening his eyes, Kido saw one of the loggers walking on site in
the rain and momentarily mistook him for Makoto Hara. He tried to decide
what he would have called out to Hara if it had actually been him. Hara had
begun his life anew after his second suicide attempt in order to be alive.
Kido wished he could have told him that he understood.
“I was looking all over for you. I was worried . . . ,” said Kido. In his
mind’s eye, Hara stopped in his tracks, turned toward him, and smiled
softly. It was as though he had at last come face-to-face with the man he’d
been chasing from behind.
Strange that it had never occurred to him before, but Kido realized
how much he wished they could have met.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Three days after her meeting with Kido, Rié told Yuto that she had
something important to discuss with him after he finished his bath. He had
been withdrawing to his room to read even more of late, and she wanted to
make sure to catch him before he vanished upstairs.
She and Hana then went to take their bath first, whereupon little Hana
delivered some news, about which she seemed both delighted and
embarrassed: one of her front teeth was loose.
“How exciting. Let me see. Oh wow. It really is loose. I bet you’ll be
one of the first kids in your class to lose a tooth!”
“Yup. In the dove class, Hinano is the only one—guess what. Today I
wanted to call to Hinano, but I said Hinono by mistake and Hashimoto-
sensei laughed at me. I’m such a dumbo-wumbo.”
Recently Hana had taken to this refrain about her intelligence,
repeating it almost every day. As always, Rié replied, “You’re not dumb,
Hana,” and patted her on the head. But she was beginning to suspect that
this response might be exactly what her daughter was after.
It amazed her to recall that only six months ago Hana still often said,
“This I think.” Rié no longer heard this verbal quirk at all anymore.
Growing up was transforming her daughter at such a dizzying pace that
memories of her from just a year ago had turned unaccountably fuzzy. Rié
felt certain that there was something distinctive about Hana that made her
Hana, and yet somehow it was difficult to tease this apart from what made
children children more generally.
In spite of this uncertainty, Rié found reassurance in Hana’s sense of
humor. Given that she had lost her father at such a young age, Hana’s high
spirits drew special attention at day care. The teachers universally told Rié
that Hana was full of smiles, and most pleasing of all for Rié, the parents
sometimes called her the most cheerful kid in class.

Yuto finished his bath at around ten o’clock. Hana and Grandma were by
then in bed. This left Rié alone in the living room when Yuto tried to walk
by her in his pajamas as though she wasn’t even there.
“Hey! Didn’t I tell you I have something I want to talk to you about?
I’ve been waiting for you.”
“What?” said Yuto with annoyance.
He had been expressing his feelings more openly these days, and Rié
thought this might be a positive sign. For what worried her most was the
possibility of him holding it all in until one day he became so disturbed that
there was nothing she could do about it. To prevent this from happening,
she was prepared to take the full brunt of his teenage rebellion, including
the share due to both her divorced and late husband.
Yuto seemed to pick up on something significant in her expression and
took a seat. “What?” he asked again.
“Three days ago, a lawyer who’s been investigating Father for over a
year came to meet with me . . . I finally learned everything. I know why he
changed his name.”
Yuto’s gaze turned to the document laid facedown near her hand. Until
a short time earlier, Rié had been gripping the edges with her fingertips as
she rounded and straightened it repeatedly.
“Who was he?”
“I’m still not sure how much I should tell you. So I wanted to ask how
you feel about it. Do you want to know everything now, or are you OK
waiting?”
Yuto was silent for a while.
“Was Dad doing something wrong?” he asked. “Something the police
might take him away for?”
Rié shook her head. “Just one tiny thing—changing his name . . .”
“Why would he do that?”
“Everything is here,” said Rié, pointing to the document. “The lawyer
wrote it all out for me.”
 “Then I’m reading it.”
“It’s really . . . how can I say this . . . I’m worried you’ll be shocked. I
haven’t fully accepted it myself.”
“Ryo died and then Father died . . . What could be more shocking than
that?”
Yuto reached out, took the document Kido had compiled, and flipped
through to check the number of pages, looking surprised by how long it
was.
“I’m going to read it upstairs,” he said. “I’ll be back.”
As her son retreated to his room, Rié tried to fathom his feelings from
his footsteps going up the wooden stairs. Watching his body mature as
rapidly as it had over these past months, she felt as though she was
supposed to have more gray hair. First his voice had changed. Then he had
sprouted a smattering of facial hair. Now he had found his dead father’s
electric razor and was doing his best to shave in imitation of him, without
any instruction. (This, Rié recalled, was not the first time the razor had
come in handy. It had also provided the hair for the DNA test.)
She had been wavering about whether to share the results of Kido’s
investigation, but had decided that she couldn’t leave him hanging after
revealing that their family name had been fraudulent. She’d had no choice
but to fill him in, partially at least. And perhaps not just partially, for
something told her that there would have been no point in hiding any of it
from Yuto, whatever might be appropriate for other fourteen-year-old boys.
She had been doing her best to stop treating him like a child.
Otherwise, she was concerned that he might become overly attached to his
mother, reared in an environment with no father figure. Since entering
adolescence, Yuto seemed to have woken up to this danger, and she could
see him struggling to find the right distance with her. Establishing a new
relationship with him promised to be stressful, for it entailed accepting that
he was an adult, the man of the house, given that no one else was there to
fill that role. The prospect was disconcerting, and part of her was tempted to
go on babying him forever.
But she also realized that part of him was beyond her ken. It both
surprised and delighted her to learn that her son was so profoundly different
from her, and she resolved to respect him as his own person. She had
stopped speaking to him condescendingly and tried instead to explain her
feelings when something upset her. Though, as the elder most intimate with
him in the world, she continued to give her honest advice and instruction.

Rié’s shift in perspective was due in no small part to Yuto’s passion for
literature. She had tried reading the Ryunosuke Akutagawa story, “Asakusa
Park,” that he’d told her about in Burial Mound Park and had since puzzled
over its meaning. It seemed to be a sort of script for a short film. Like an
anxious dream put into words, it included a variety of surreal imagery, such
as the sign that inexplicably becomes a “sandwich man” or the cylindrical
postbox that turns transparent to reveal the letters inside. For Rié, who was
not much of a reader, these aspects of the story were mystifying.
Of more interest and concern for her was the general plot. It was about
a “boy in his twelfth or thirteenth calendar year” who visits the Asakusa
area of Tokyo, becomes separated from his father, and searches everywhere
for him in distress. The climax comes when the boy sits down on “the base
portion of a large stone lantern” and “starts to cry, covering his face.” He
had mistaken a man with “mouth and nose covered behind a mask” and “a
smile somewhat suggestive of malice” for his father almost immediately
after losing him, but now, unbeknownst to the boy, this man actually
becomes his father.
Rié was unable to work out the overall point of the story.
Nevertheless, when the boy began to cry, she found herself crying too. It
wasn’t so much pity for the character. Rather, her tears began to fall when
she imagined Yuto empathizing as he read it. No doubt this was a sign of
his ongoing struggle with loneliness and pain, even if he didn’t talk about it.
But what astounded her was that he had been reading this story before she
told him that his father wasn’t actually Daisuké Taniguchi. Had this been a
mere coincidence? Or could he have intuited something without her
realizing? What had been going on inside her son when he read it?
Rié’s breath caught in her throat at such non sequiturs as, “Hurry,
hurry. Nobody knows when death will come.” Yuto had only mentioned the
uncanny exchange between the boy and the tiger lily; he had never told her
that the story was about being separated from one’s father. But he must
have wanted her to know he was reading it. And even though she didn’t
really understand the work itself, her son’s roundabout effort to share his
emotional connection to it had helped her to understand him better. At the
very least, she was able to sound the depths of his interiority. How peculiar
that she saw her son every day but had only succeeded in drawing closer to
him through a book.
Rié had always put readers on a pedestal and unfortunately, neither she
nor the men she married had been that type. This could only mean that
Yuto’s penchant for reading arose from something distinctive in him that he
didn’t share with any of his parents. While the cause of this difference must
have been in his milieu, it nonetheless seemed beautiful to Rié, like a flower
budding spontaneously from the wreckage of some disaster.
As if in compensation for hardly speaking to his family, Yuto had been
steadily writing in his notebook. As curious as Rié was, she was afraid that
taking a peek might irreparably damage his trust in her and had resolved
never to touch it. But there turned out to be no need, for she soon came
across a portion of what he had created.
The previous fall, a haiku that Yuto had submitted as part of his
summer break homework had been awarded top prize in the middle school
category of an all-Japan competition held by a newspaper. As Yuto had kept
even this to himself, Rié had only learned about it sometime after the
ceremony when she spotted a big commemorative plaque lying in the
corner of his room. Beside it was the award-winning poem:

In his cast-off shell

How rich the singing echoes
Cicada voices

Rié did not feel qualified to evaluate the poem herself but could hardly
believe that Yuto had composed it. The judges’ comments, which he had
later shown to her with great reluctance, criticized it for “affected
ostentation,” while also, to Rié’s amazement, praising his “precocious
talent.” In his acceptance speech, published by the newspaper, Yuto had
provided this explanation:
“In Burial Mound Park, I saw the abandoned shell of a cicada stuck to
a cherry tree. In the upper branches, many cicadas were singing. I listened
carefully, trying to find the voice of the cicada that had flown from that
shell. I imagined how it must have sounded to the shell to hear the voice of
the body that had been inside it under the earth for seven years.
“Then I was staring at the crack along the back of the shell and it
reminded me of the soundboard of a violin. When the whole shell started to
look to me like a resonating musical instrument, I came up with this poem.”
Yuto made no mention of the death of his brother or father. And yet,
Rié knew that the cherry tree mentioned must be the one her husband had
chosen for himself. And although she wasn’t sure whether Yuto had actually
visited Burial Mound Park without them and had such an experience or
whether it was a fabrication, she pictured her son alone at the foot of the
tree, staring at the shell while listening to the cicadas, and couldn’t stop
crying. It wasn’t her place to say whether he had “precocious talent,” but it
hardly mattered to her, for she could now see how literature brought him
solace. On his own, Yuto had discovered a method for coping with the
ordeals of life that she would never have been able to recommend or even
think of herself.

All this past year, Rié’s late husband had gone without a name, and when
she learned through Kido’s report that it was “Makoto Hara,” she felt as
though she were meeting him all over again. But overcoming her
estrangement was not a simple matter of endowing the man in her
memories with this proper noun; she still needed to decide what to call him.
Now that she knew he was two years younger than her, not two years
older as she had always believed, Rié finally had a satisfactory explanation
for why she had felt compelled to attach the diminutive suffix “kun” to his
name. But while she shrunk from “Daisuké-kun,” as though it were
someone else’s possession she had been using by mistake, she could not
immediately switch to “Makoto-kun” either. For without being able to
receive his reply when she called to him, she had no way of knowing if that
appellation was right. It wasn’t until Kido left and she found herself capable
of looking at the pictures of her husband on her computer for the first time
in ages that she felt certain of his wishes. Something told her that he had
yearned for the day she called him by his real name, praying that she would
love the whole of him—not as Daisuké but as Makoto.
Rié had never heard of Kenkichi Kobayashi. She figured she’d
probably seen something about his crimes on the news at the time, but had
no memory of it. The details of what he had done were so hideous and
gruesome that she wavered long and hard about whether to conceal that part
of the report from Yuto. She had thought of murder as something
completely removed from the world that she inhabited, and was distressed
to discover that it had been linked to her family all along. She recalled
Kyoichi’s suggestion that her late husband had committed a heinous crime.
Did the man feel vindicated to learn that he’d been the child of a killer? She
could almost hear him saying, “I told you so.” But as it turned out, her
husband himself had never committed any such sins, as she had wanted to
believe all along.
Rié was deeply moved by what she read of Makoto’s sad life in Kido’s
report and began to suspect that it was this her husband had sought to
convey through the unfortunate story of Daisuké. Why did he choose that
particular method? She couldn’t say. Maybe his intention was simply to let
her know about the deep wounds in his heart. After all, even if you
misrepresented the cause, an injury was an injury, and pain was pain.
Though such distortions would, of course, only confound efforts to find the
right treatment.
When Rié read the testimony of the people who knew Makoto during
his boxing days, when he agonized over his genetic inheritance, she
couldn’t help worrying about Hana. While she wasn’t bothered in the least
by the idea that the blood of a murderer ran in her daughter’s veins, it was
still possible that Hana might despair if she were to one day learn the truth.
Yuto was different in that respect, as he had no biological link with Makoto.
If he had, Rié might have been even more circumspect about showing him
the report.
After all this, she had to ask herself whether she would have loved
Makoto if she had known the truth from the start. Did love even need the
past? She wanted to say no. And yet, if she was honest with herself, she
suspected that she would not have been capable of embracing a partner with
such a tortured history at a time when grieving her own losses and raising
Yuto had absorbed all her energy—ultimately, there was no way to know.
But the fact was that, thanks to Makoto’s lies, they had fallen in love and
she had been blessed with Hana.
Kido’s report was such a tome that Rié finally began to wonder why
he’d gone to such lengths for her. And why had he come all the way out to
Town S when an email or a phone call would have more than sufficed?
Only when he made one particular statement after running through the main
substance of his report, a statement that stirred her emotions more than
anything else he said, did she gain a glimmering of insight into his motives.
“I think that the three years and nine months that Hara-san spent with
you was the first time that he ever knew happiness. True joy, I suspect. As
short as your time together was, it was the culmination of his entire life.”
Rié found these words deeply reassuring and realized that conveying
them was Kido’s reason for making the trek to see her in person. But as she
decided not to pry, she never understood why exactly this was so important
to him.

Yuto remained shut up in his room for about an hour. Rié was just thinking
that she should go check on him when she heard his footsteps coming down
from the second floor.
“I read it,” he said, passing her the sheaf of papers brusquely.
“You’re finished?”
“Yeah.” Yuto remained standing there impassively for a moment and
then started for his room without a word.
“Yuto.”
Yuto turned around.
“Are you OK?”
“Sure . . . Dad never killed anyone, right?”
“Never.”
“I feel so sorry for him.”
“It’s kind of you to say that, Yuto.”
“Now I understand why he was . . . so nice to me.”
“Why?”
“I think Dad . . . he did for me what he wanted his father to do for him
. . .”
 Seeing the look of tender innocence on his face, Rié’s eyes began to
sting, and she tightened her mouth.
“True . . . But that wasn’t the only reason. He also did it because he
cared about you.”
“Mom . . . I’m sorry.”
“Why? What for?”
Yuto hung his head and burst out crying. As his shoulders shook with
sobs, he wiped away his tears with his arm and struggled to get himself
under control. Rié cried along with him. When she tried to offer him a
handkerchief, he rubbed his wet face with his palms and looked at her with
red, puffy eyes.
“So, our last name . . . in the end, what will happen? Are we going to
be the Haras?”
Rié smiled and said, “I don’t think so . . . How about the Takemotos?
Then we’ll be the same as Grandma and Grandpa again.”
After a spasm of coughing, Yuto gave a slight nod. “What are you
going to do about Dad’s grave?”
“Good question . . . How about we put him in the same grave as Ryo
and Grandpa?”
“Sounds good. Then none of them will be lonely.”
“Yuto . . .”
“What?”
“I’m the one who should be apologizing for not keeping you in the
loop.”
Yuto shook his head and took a deep breath. “Are you going to tell
Hana?” he asked gravely.
“What do you think?”
“I doubt she’d understand if we told her now.”
“I agree.”
“We have to watch out for her.”
Rié felt the urge to cry again but held it back, looked her strong-
minded son in the eye, and nodded. My, how he’s grown, she thought.
“Promise you’ll tell me if you ever need to talk.”
Yuto gave a slight nod and said, “You too, Mom . . . OK, good night.”
“Sweet dreams. See you tomorrow.”
 As she watched her son leave the living room, she tried to imagine
how he might spend the rest of the night and felt a lump in her throat. But
all she could do right then was let him go.
Once she was alone, Rié put her elbows on the table and hung her
head between them, keeping her eyes closed for a while. The only sound
was the ticking of the clock on the wall. When she lifted her face again, she
gazed at the memorial photos of her father and Ryo adorning the cupboard
and then at the picture of her family of four.
He was gone now. And the two children he had left behind were
growing up.
She decided that those three years and nine months had been happy for
her as well, so happy that her memories of that time and everything that
flowed from it might just content her for the rest of her life.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In addition to the various sources I consulted and quoted, this book would
not have been possible without the cooperation of many people with my
interviews and investigations. I would like to take this opportunity to give
them my sincere thanks.
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © Mikiya Takimoto

Keiichiro Hirano is an award-winning and bestselling novelist whose debut

novel, The Eclipse, won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1998, when he
was a twenty-three-year-old university student. A cultural envoy to Paris
appointed by Japan’s Ministry of Cultural Affairs, he has given lectures
throughout Europe. Widely read in France, China, Korea, Taiwan, Italy, and
Egypt, Hirano is also the author of At the End of the Matinee, a runaway
bestseller in Japan, among many other books. His short fiction has appeared
in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature. A Man, winner
of Japan’s Yomiuri Prize for Literature, is the first of Hirano’s novels to be
translated into English. For more information, visit en.k-hirano.com and
follow Hirano on Twitter at @hiranok_en.
 ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Photo © 2019 Alexander O. Smith

Eli K. P. William is the author of the Jubilee Cycle, three novels set in a
dystopian future Tokyo: Cash Crash Jubilee, The Naked World, and A
Diamond Dream. Originally from Toronto, Canada, he has lived in Japan
for over a decade and has spent most of that time working as a Japanese
translator. A Man is his first full novel translation to be published. For more
information, visit www.elikpwilliam.com.