The imposture by which an unnamed man lived as Daisuké Taniguchi is the central reversal behind Rié’s second marriage: her husband was legally recorded as a real, independently existing man, yet the real Daisuké’s brother identified the photographs as someone else. The deception was not limited to a borrowed name. The impostor married Rié, raised children with her, and left government records that continued to attest to the identity he had assumed.

Identity and the Recognition

The discrepancy becomes undeniable when Kyoichi Taniguchi, Daisuké’s elder brother, sees a photograph of Rié’s deceased husband. At first Kyoichi wonders whether the man simply looks different from when he was younger. He then insists that the issue is not a change in appearance: the photographed man is someone else entirely. Rié asks whether this is not Daisuké, and Kyoichi confirms that he is Daisuké’s brother.

Rié’s mother is present as Kyoichi reacts with visible unease. His awkward smile and angry, disgusted expression make the conversation more alarming, not less: Rié has to reckon not only with the possibility that her husband deceived her but also with the stranger now examining her family’s history. The revelation unsettles the household before it clarifies anything about the impostor’s actual name or past.

The Album and the Evidence

The family album gives Kyoichi a sequence of images to examine. Daisuké had assembled it from printouts of digital photographs, showing the man who claimed to be Daisuké alongside Rié, Yuto, and Hana. Kyoichi studies the pages one by one, then stops at the final photograph: an old picture of himself with his parents at the family home. He remembers why his brother is absent from it—Daisuké took the photograph.

That memory anchors Kyoichi’s recognition in more than a vague impression of resemblance. He knows the family photograph and the circumstances in which it was taken, but the man who appears in the later pictures with Rié and the children is not his brother. Looking at Rié, Kyoichi concludes that she had been fooled by an impostor and says that the man was impersonating Daisuké. When she asks who he really was, Kyoichi cannot answer: he has only just seen the photograph and does not recognize the man. His immediate suggestion is to go to the police, since the deception might be a scam.

A Marriage Certified by the State

The case is especially difficult because the name Daisuké Taniguchi was not invented. According to the family-register information, a person of that name actually existed. Rié’s husband had used that real person’s identity, married her under it, and fathered a child with her. By the time Rié sought help, the man who had lived with her was dead, while the actual Daisuké had a brother able to identify the impostor from a photograph.

The legal record had given the assumed identity unusually broad authority. Government officials verified it when the marriage notification prompted an update to the family register and again when a death notification was filed. The man drove using a license and visited a doctor with a health-insurance card, paid his pension contributions, and left no apparent contradiction in his official account of growing up in Gunma. The documents therefore did not merely record a casual alias: across marriage, death, and ordinary public dealings, they certified him as Daisuké Taniguchi.

That official continuity stands in sharp contrast to the brother’s visual recognition. The public record says that Daisuké married Rié and died; Kyoichi says that the photographed husband was not Daisuké. A name that could be authenticated by institutions was not enough to establish that the person using it was the person to whom it belonged. The imposture’s decisive force lies in that divide between documentary identity and embodied recognition.

The Life Behind the Assumed Name

Kido learns of the deception when Rié contacts him after their earlier lawyer-client relationship has ended. He had represented her in her first divorce; after a year of mediation, she returned to her maiden name, Takemoto, and they lost touch. When she writes again, she is using Taniguchi, and Kido initially does not realize that she is the same client. He is glad to learn she has remarried, but her account changes that understanding: her husband, known as Daisuké Taniguchi, is dead and was someone else.

Kido finds the story difficult to understand. False names and concealed identities are familiar enough, and his own experience as a third-generation Zainichi person makes the desire to hide part of one’s identity intelligible to him. What confounds him is not that someone might use a false name, but that he would assume the identity of a real person and then have that identity confirmed repeatedly by official procedures. Kido begins by trying to work out how he can assist Rié as a lawyer, including sorting out inheritance-related matters, and meets the actual Daisuké’s brother, Kyoichi, as part of that effort.

The wider story also sets this impersonation beside other lives marked by imposed identities and stigma. Makoto Hara’s history includes a period in an orphanage, a later boxing career, and repeated shoplifting convictions; a magazine profile turns his criminal father into a basis for speculation about inherited criminality. The evidence does not make Hara’s history the explanation for the impostor’s actions. Rather, the juxtaposition shows how records, ancestry, and public stories can attach identities to people and make those identities difficult to escape.

Significance

The imposture makes a marriage both real in lived experience and false in its legally recorded foundation. Rié shared a household with the man, and he occupied the roles of husband and father in the family photographs; none of that makes him the person named in the register. Conversely, the register’s repeated official confirmations could not make Kyoichi recognize his brother in the man’s face. The family album preserves the intimacy of the shared life while also furnishing the evidence that breaks its assumed identity apart.

The event also sharpens the book’s concern with stigma and the reduction of a person to a single defining fact. Kido describes stigma as the way one trait can eclipse a person’s complexity, whether that trait is one’s background, a visible mark, or a criminal record. Here, the name itself is the imposed and legally maintained fact: institutions treat the impostor as Daisuké, while family memory contradicts them. The story leaves the impostor’s actual identity unresolved in this encounter, making the gap between a documented life and a known person the revelation’s lasting consequence.