Kido Investigation X with True Daisuké

Kido’s investigation into X and the real Daisuké Taniguchi grows from a bewildering contradiction: Rié has lost a husband who lived under a real man’s name, while that man, officially recorded as dead, may still be alive. Kido approaches the case as a lawyer, tracing documents and testing testimony against physical evidence; the deeper the inquiry goes, the less the official record can settle what a person’s identity means.

The legal puzzle and the search for Daisuké

On a train home, as twilight fades from the windows and Kido’s reflection becomes distinct in the glass, he turns over Rié’s predicament. Years earlier, in 2004, he had represented her in her divorce. She was then known by her husband’s surname, Yoneda; after a year of mediation, she returned to her maiden name, Takemoto, and their professional contact ended. When she emailed him years later under the name Taniguchi, he first failed to recognize her. He was glad to learn that she had remarried—until he learned that her new husband had died and that the man who had lived with her as Daisuké Taniguchi was not the real Daisuké.

The deception was not simply a false name used in private. According to the family-register information Kido examines, a real Daisuké Taniguchi existed. Government officials had accepted the impostor’s marriage and death notifications, and the identity had been used across ordinary civic life: he drove with a license, visited doctors with a health-insurance card, and paid pension contributions. His account of growing up in Gunma did not appear to contain discrepancies. Yet when Daisuké’s brother saw a photograph of Rié’s husband, he swore that the man was not his brother. The records certified one identity; the family’s recognition rejected it.

Kido’s initial practical concern is to deal with inheritance matters, and he meets Daisuké’s brother, Kyoichi Taniguchi, at the Cerulean Hotel in Shibuya. Kyoichi, fourth-generation inheritor of an inn in Ikaho Onsen, tells him that the most promising lead is Daisuké’s former lover. Kido also learns that Kyoichi has introduced him to several people who may know where his brother is. Rather than begin with rumor, Kido decides to look for the address-change attachment to Daisuké’s family register, expecting that the document may help him trace the real man’s movements.

The investigation is complicated by the difference between the person who appears in the legal record and the person remembered by those who knew Daisuké. Kido can understand why someone might conceal a name: as a third-generation Zainichi Korean who became a naturalized Japanese citizen in high school, he knows that people may hide their backgrounds. What perplexes him is the apparent choice to impersonate not a fictitious person but a living, identifiable one. In this case, a false identity has not remained outside the state’s systems; it has passed through them and become official fact.

Misuzu’s photographs and testimony

Toward the end of January 2013, after work settles down in the new year, Kido arranges to meet Misuzu Goto, identified as Daisuké’s former lover. The phone number Kyoichi supplied no longer works, but Kyoichi had said that Misuzu was a web designer, and Kido finds her Facebook page. After he explains the situation, Misuzu replies quickly, worried and confused about Daisuké. She suggests meeting at a friend’s bar in Tokyo, where she works nights on the side; Kido accepts, judging that she may feel safer in a public place than meeting him alone.

At the bar, Kido shows Misuzu a photograph of X and asks whether she recognizes the man. She does not. She says that the man does not resemble Daisuké and estimates Daisuké’s height by holding a hand roughly a glass’s height above her head. The physical mismatch offers a direct challenge to the identity that the documents have certified, but Misuzu does not claim to know who X is. Her response is limited and useful: the pictured husband is not the man she remembers as Daisuké.

Misuzu has brought a brown envelope containing three photographs of Daisuké from their relationship, more than ten years earlier. They are more recent than the material Kyoichi could provide. His available family photograph showed Daisuké only as a tiny figure in profile; Kyoichi lacked childhood images from before digital cameras were ubiquitous, and the brothers’ falling-out had left him without adult photographs. In Misuzu’s pictures, Daisuké faces the camera with a stiff, bashful expression. Kido reads in it the awkwardness of a shy man being photographed by his lover, and finds that the real Daisuké does not resemble X. Misuzu lets him keep the pictures, while making clear that she has had no contact with Daisuké for more than a decade and cannot say what has become of him.

Her recollections give Kido more than a visual comparison: they place Daisuké in a period of life that Kyoichi’s limited photographs cannot illuminate. Misuzu says that they attended Daisuké’s father’s funeral together. Daisuké continued living with his family for a while afterward; by then Misuzu had moved to Tokyo, and they met perhaps twice a week. Her testimony establishes a personal history and a chronology of closeness, while also marking its limits: she remembers their relationship, but the long separation means she cannot account for his later whereabouts.

From recollection to forensic proof

Toward the end of February, Kido visits Rié in Miyazaki. They talk in the waiting area of her shop, then go to a nearby eel restaurant when she learns that he has not eaten. It is the restaurant where X had once told her the story of Daisuké, although Rié has not chosen it for that reason; it is simply one of the few suitable places within walking distance that remains open. The setting brings the investigation back to the life X shared with Rié, but their conversation is also practical. Kido is still trying to establish what can be proved, and Rié is the person whose family register and marriage have been altered by the deception.

The court requires Rié to appear in person because of the case’s complexity and requests DNA testing to demonstrate that X was not Daisuké Taniguchi. Kido collects samples from X’s personal effects: hair from his clothes, nail clippings from his nail clippers, his electric razor, and his toothbrush. He takes these materials back to Yokohama. The objects are ordinary traces of a dead man’s daily life, repurposed as evidence against the name under which he lived. The investigation thus moves from photographs and remembered appearances toward biological comparison, with the court demanding proof capable of addressing the discrepancy directly.

The records have consequences beyond identifying the two men. Kido petitions the Miyazaki Family Court, which has jurisdiction over the family registers of residents of Town S, for two revisions. First, he seeks to cancel the record that removed Daisuké from the register on the basis of death, so that the real Daisuké will once again appear alive and will no longer be treated as a missing person who is legally dead. Second, he seeks to remove the false Daisuké from Rié’s register and restore her maiden name, Takemoto, annulling the marriage on the ground of error. Those changes would erase Rié’s second marriage from her family register and make Hana, her child with X, legally illegitimate. Establishing the imposture is therefore not an abstract correction: it affects Rié’s legal identity, Hana’s status, and the official account of whether the real Daisuké is alive.

Kido’s role and the case’s human weight

Kido’s method combines documentary reconstruction with the careful gathering of testimony. He looks for Daisuké’s address-change record, consults the brother who first exposed the mismatch, locates a former lover through an obsolete phone number and an online profile, and preserves her photographs as investigative material. When the court asks for biological proof, he gathers samples from X’s belongings. Each step answers a different weakness in the evidence: public records confirm the impostor’s assumed life, family recognition disputes his face, Misuzu’s pictures offer comparison with the real Daisuké, and DNA testing is intended to establish the difference through physical evidence.

His work also has a personal dimension, though the evidence does not make him the center of Rié’s story. Kido recognizes the social pressure behind concealed identities through his own experience of Zainichi background and naturalization. That familiarity helps him understand the desire to hide one’s name or heritage, but it does not resolve the stranger question confronting him: why adopt the name of a real person and successfully conduct an entire legal life under it? His uncertainty remains important. The investigation proceeds not from a ready explanation of X’s motive, but from the need to establish who the men were and what the official record has done to the people around them.

During his nearly half-day with Rié, their conversation ranges beyond the petition. She asks whether he has children and learns that he now has a son around Hana’s age; they talk at length about parenting. She also asks what he was doing when the earthquake struck. Kido recalls the streets filling with cars, crowds walking home after transport stopped, cracked buildings, blackouts, water outages, and the lull in Chinatown after foreign workers returned home and customers dwindled. Rié imagines having endured the same disruption in a different life—one in which she had not lost Ryo or divorced her first husband, and therefore had never met the man who died in a logging accident in her hometown. Their exchange places the legal investigation beside the contingent lives that brought them to it: the case is about identity on paper, but its stakes are inseparable from the particular families and losses made possible by those identities.

When Rié describes X’s paintings, Kido listens attentively and encourages her. He agrees to investigate X’s background for a fee so low that she feels guilty about accepting his help. Rié calls him a good person, then regrets her sudden familiarity; Kido smiles and leans back slightly, answering that it is his job. The gesture preserves the professional boundary even as the investigation has brought them into intimate territory—parenthood, bereavement, and the imagined lives they might have led. His role is not to supply Rié with a simple account of her husband, but to turn the painful contradiction between lived memory and public record into questions a court can examine.