Daisuké Taniguchi

Daisuké Taniguchi is the real person behind the name Makoto Hara adopts, but he is not the man who marries Rié and raises a family with her. The real Daisuké disappears into another identity, later identified as Yoshihiko Sonézaki, while Hara lives as Daisuké. His survival turns an apparent case of a dead husband’s impersonation into a more troubling story of exchanged records, abandoned relationships, and a past that can be covered over but not cleanly erased.

Identity and Background

Daisuké is the younger brother of Kyoichi Taniguchi. The brothers’ relationship has become estranged: they have fallen out, and Kyoichi has few photographs of Daisuké as an adult. One family photograph, taken at their childhood home, shows Kyoichi with their parents; Daisuké is absent because he was the one behind the camera. The image later helps Kyoichi recognize that the man who lived as his brother is an impostor, not a changed or older version of Daisuké.

Misuzu Goto knew Daisuké from high school. Their relationship repeatedly moved between dating and breaking up, and they were together for a time. She retains three photographs from their romance, all more recent than the few images Kyoichi can offer. In them Daisuké faces Misuzu’s camera with a stiff, bashful expression, a visual contrast to the man in the photographs of Rié’s husband. Kido compares the images and concludes that the real Daisuké does not resemble the man who used his name.

The distinction between the two men is obscured by the records. The husband Rié knew as Daisuké had married her, fathered a child, driven under his own license, used health insurance, paid pension contributions, and been officially recorded as Daisuké through both marriage and death notifications. His account of growing up in Gunma appeared consistent with the public record. Yet Kyoichi, seeing the husband’s photographs, insists that he is someone else entirely. The state’s documentary certainty and the family’s recognition of a face point in opposite directions.

The Exchange of Lives

Kido’s investigation reconstructs a chain of identity changes. Makoto Hara first exchanged family registers with Yoshihiko Sonézaki and lived for a time under Sonézaki’s name. Hara later crossed paths with Daisuké and took on Daisuké’s identity, although Kido cannot establish whether the second exchange was mutual or whether Hara took Daisuké’s register without his consent. On this reconstruction, the real Daisuké became Yoshihiko Sonézaki, while Hara became Daisuké Taniguchi and eventually met Rié in Town S.

The earlier trail supports the idea that Daisuké remained himself at least until his time in an inexpensive apartment in Osaka. Kyoichi visits the building’s management office and shows its president photographs. The man recognizes the real Daisuké as a likely former tenant but does not recognize Hara’s face. Kyoichi takes this as evidence that Daisuké was still living under his own identity before he encountered Hara; afterward, his name and family register were taken from him. When Kyoichi asks for a forwarding address or phone number, the president becomes wary and offers only to search for old files.

For years, the family has no word from Daisuké after the earthquake. Kyoichi speculates that his brother may have been murdered, though he has done little to look for him and is afraid of uncovering trouble. Their mother rebukes him, tearfully urging him to intensify the search because she wants to see her younger son once more before she dies. Daisuké’s absence is therefore not merely a puzzle in the family register: it is an unresolved separation with a living mother waiting for news.

Kyoichi and Misuzu try to use social media to draw Daisuké out. Misuzu creates and posts through an account in his name, populated with old photographs, his hometown and schools, and preferences including the music of Michael Schenker and his bands Scorpions and UFO. They consider contacting UFO’s official page, but its roughly 250,000 followers make the prospect impractical. The account is an awkward lure: it may reach Daisuké, but it also risks showing him an invented version of himself exchanging intimate comments with his former lover.

A Self Rewritten

Kido’s deductions eventually lead him to contact someone he believes may be Daisuké, using the initials Y. S. The message informs its recipient that the man who had lived as Daisuké has died and that his widow is seeking to understand the past. Kido suspects that this news might stir the recipient’s curiosity or anxiety: if he is the real Daisuké, the death may expose the exchange that linked him to Hara, while the life he left behind may still exert a pull.

A reply arrives shortly after two in the morning under the name Yoichi Furusawa. Its writer questions whether Kido is truly a lawyer and asks who the initials refer to, who created the Daisuké account, and how Kido is connected to the people involved. The evasiveness makes Kido reconsider Misuzu’s hunch that the correspondent is Yoshihiko Sonézaki—and therefore the real Daisuké. Kido proposes a video call so they can verify one another before speaking directly.

When Kido meets Sonézaki at a Komeda’s Coffee near Nagoya Station, the man is waiting in the smoking area, wearing a gray knit cap and an embroidered bomber jacket. Although the photographs are more than ten years old, Kido recognizes him without doubt: Daisuké is alive. The recognition reverses the presumed finality of the impostor’s death. The man whose public identity had been documented as deceased is sitting across from Kido under the name that, in Kido’s reconstruction, belongs to the person he once became.

Daisuké asks Kido to call him Sonézaki. He explains that a year after a register exchange, a person can feel different, because the exchange changes more than the name: it brings another past with it. When Kido addresses him as Daisuké Taniguchi, he is startled by the suggestion that the name refers to him. He says that after the swap he came to feel as if he had never known the Taniguchis; seeing Kyoichi online, he saw only the comic proprietor of a provincial inn. Identity, in his account, is not a label attached to an unchanged self. It is shaped by severed ties, a new place, and the life one learns to inhabit.

Forgetting, however, is not the same as erasure. Daisuké says that cutting relationships and moving away lets memories fade, but trying simply to forget a hated past does not work. The past has to be overwritten with someone else’s until it is unrecognizable. His description makes the register exchange both practical concealment and an attempted remaking of the self: the new identity offers distance, but the need to overwrite what came before betrays its continued presence.

Family, Love, and Refusal

Daisuké refuses to meet the Taniguchi family, even if that refusal leaves him homeless. He asks Kido to let Daisuké Taniguchi rest in his grave, treating the name as a dead person’s identity rather than a claim he wants restored. Whatever the official records say, he does not want to return to the family he once left. Kyoichi’s search and their mother’s longing therefore meet a firm boundary: the person they seek is alive, but survival has not made reconciliation welcome.

Misuzu is the one exception. Daisuké tells Kido that he has long wished to see her again and imagines her beside him on his deathbed; in that imagined final scene, she is the only person he wants present. His insistence that he will not see his family sits beside this unguarded attachment to his former lover. The past he rejects is not a single, uniformly unwanted life: he has discarded his family ties while preserving the desire to recover one intimate relationship.

Daisuké’s story makes the novel’s identity exchanges more than a question of who possesses which name. Hara’s life as Daisuké allows him to become a husband and father, while the real Daisuké survives by inhabiting Sonézaki and disavowing the people and memories attached to his old register. Yet the photograph, the family’s search, the false online account, and the eventual meeting keep bringing the displaced past back into view. A life can be administratively reassigned and lived under another name; the attachments left behind remain harder to replace.