“The dead cannot call out to us”
A Man“The dead cannot call out to us” is the principle through which Rié confronts her late husband’s uncertain identity: the dead cannot restore their own names, so the living must find a way to call them. In her case, mourning becomes inseparable from the question of whose death her husband died and what it means to remember someone whose identity has been taken from him.
Naming and the Unnamed Dead
Rié resists calling her husband X, the code Kido uses for him. To her, assigning someone a code without their permission is an insult to human dignity. The label also makes the conversation feel as though it concerns a stranger. When Kido says it, Rié can lose the thread of what is being discussed; she recognizes that the word is meant to refer to her husband, yet cannot make it serve as his name. As he recedes from her understanding, the absence of a name becomes a barrier to mourning.
The expression gives that absence a stark consequence: the dead wait for the living to call to them, but a person whose name is unknown cannot be called for. Unremembered in the language that once connected them to others, such dead sink further into solitude. The line makes naming more than a matter of accurate identification. It is the surviving person’s remaining means of addressing the dead and maintaining a relation with them.
A Death Without a Secure Name
Rié’s private question is “Who died?” The family-register records identify the deceased as Daisuké Taniguchi, but Rié knows that this name cannot simply settle the matter: Daisuké Taniguchi should have had a death that belonged to him alone. The discrepancy leaves her asking who her husband had been—and whose death he had died. The expression thus reaches beyond grief for a lost person to the uncertainty created when a life and a name have been separated.
At home, Rié kneels before her husband’s photograph on the altar, searching for words that might make him turn around. With the children present, she had called him Papa or Father; alone together, she called him Daisuké-kun. The familiar name that once belonged to their private closeness is now, to her, the name of a complete stranger. The distance between intimacy and estrangement lies inside the name itself.
The Intimacy and Pain of Calling
Rié remembers that she had used the suffix kun for someone usually younger than herself, almost as if her husband were a classmate from elementary school. His youthful quality, which she associated with his sketchbooks, had drawn that form of address from her; even the sound of suké seemed to invite it. These memories give the lost name a texture of its own, but do not resolve the identity problem: affection had gathered around a name that she can no longer confidently assign to the man she loved.
She recalls saying Daisuké-kun in moments when her love was deepest and the distance between them smallest. When no one else is present and there is no need to distinguish one person from another, calling a beloved by name is an act of intimacy. Now that the name is revealed as belonging to someone else, Rié wonders how her husband experienced those moments: her affection had filled the name and surrounded him with its lingering resonance, even as she spoke another man’s name. The expression’s force lies in that painful reversal. The call that once affirmed their closeness cannot now be answered, and the name that carried her love also marks the uncertainty separating her from the dead.
