Kido investigation household registration broker Otsuji

Kido’s investigation of Omiura begins as a practical attempt to find a broker who might explain the apparent exchange of identities between the real Daisuké Taniguchi and the man who lived and died under his name. It becomes a more unsettling inquiry when Omiura answers direct questions with evasions, communicates through coded drawings, and finally suggests that his own name may also be borrowed. The search thus exposes not only the fragility of official records but the difficulty of knowing whom, or what, those records identify.

The lead from a family-register case

A 2007 case involving two men who had exchanged family registers drew Kido’s attention because its timing matched the year Daisuké left his Osaka apartment and X appeared in Town S. The case had also involved a third party who arranged exchanges for a fee. That broker, later convicted in an investment scam and sentenced to prison, was serving his sentence at Yokohama Prison, close enough to Kido’s home to make a visit feasible.

Kido wrote to the inmate to ask about an incident from six years earlier. The reply said that a meeting would be “his pleasure,” an oddly receptive answer from a stranger with no apparent reason to welcome a lawyer’s questions. Kido arranged to visit, carrying the photograph of the man who had presented himself as Daisuké Taniguchi. The broker’s family name was Omiura.

A meeting that resists the question

At the prison, Kido tried to keep the interview focused on the missing real Taniguchi and the dead impostor. Omiura instead digressed into an elaborate account of people he called the Three-Hundred-Year-Olds, a story Kido regarded as nonsense. With about fifteen minutes left in the visit, Kido interrupted him and asked whether he knew Daisuké Taniguchi.

Omiura looked at the photograph, leaned back, and appeared bored. Kido explained that a man who had used Taniguchi’s name had died, while the real Taniguchi was missing; he suspected a family-register exchange and wanted to know whether Omiura knew anything about it. Omiura responded by identifying the subject as the second son from Ikaho Onsen, a detail that made Kido’s eyes widen: the broker seemed to recognize the person or circumstances at the center of the inquiry. But he immediately withdrew into ambiguity, leaving Kido without a clear confirmation or usable account.

Omiura’s manner made the difficulty more than a matter of obtaining information. Kido judged him mercurial, with truth and fiction so entangled that separating them risked making even the facts unreadable. He chose not to contact him for a time, watching for a response rather than assuming that another direct approach would help. The pause turned the correspondence itself into part of the investigation.

Postcards and a possible identification

Omiura eventually sent eight postcards, each reproducing a nude image from an issue of Asahi Geino in ballpoint pen. Studying the drawings, Kido reconsidered his first impression of Omiura’s talk. He began to suspect that the inmate had been trying to communicate an experience of sexual assault and perhaps to seek legal advice or human compassion. The drawings did not provide a straightforward answer about Taniguchi, but they prompted Kido to recognize that the seemingly irrelevant material might carry a personal appeal.

The subject then shifted from copied tabloid images to drawings of Kannon, the bodhisattva, sitting beside the water and looking at the moon’s reflection. Kido sent Omiura a letter of thanks and applied for another visit. Omiura’s answer addressed him as “Dear Korean!” and asked whether his eyes were “just empty holes,” ending with the emphatic insult “C-H-U-M-P!” Kido could not tell whether the salutation was friendly or mocking. The exchange brought his heritage into the correspondence while leaving the meaning of Omiura’s gestures unsettled.

Omiura’s next drawings returned to raunchy manga imagery. On one, Kido noticed two names written around the figure: Daisuké Taniguchi and Yoshihiko Sonézaki. The names offered a possible clue linking the missing man to X, but the drawing was not an explanation. When Kido showed it to Nakakita, his colleague interpreted the juxtaposition as Omiura’s way of saying that Yoshihiko Sonézaki was X. The inference sharpened the trail without making Omiura’s method any less oblique.

A second approach and a warning

Kido doubted that Omiura would agree to see him again, so he wrote that he had researched the matter and now understood what the postcards had been trying to convey. This time Omiura replied immediately, without an accompanying illustration, and invited him to visit whenever he liked. The sudden change of heart seemed peculiar precisely because it came from Omiura, whose communication had so far depended on delay, provocation, and images.

During their next meeting, Omiura challenged Kido’s assumptions about him. He asked how Kido knew that he was really Norio Omiura, then compared the question to a tattoo artist’s need to tattoo himself. With family registers being exchanged, he argued, Kido had no reason to think he was an exception. Kido asked whether Omiura was actually someone else too. Omiura laughed, but did not give a name or confirm an alternative identity. The possibility remained a taunt, not a resolved fact.

Omiura then told Kido that the man he was trying so hard to understand was merely an ordinary, unremarkable person, and urged him to leave the matter alone. He invoked the danger of a snake hidden in tall grass and referred to the man as the child of killers, connecting the investigation to Kido’s own family. The warning did not solve the identity puzzle; instead, it redirected its pressure toward the investigator, suggesting that Kido’s search might expose something personal as well as uncover the past.

Role in the identity investigation

Omiura occupies an unstable position in Kido’s inquiry: he is a convicted broker associated with family-register exchanges, a potential source about the disappearance of Daisuké, and a narrator whose accounts cannot readily be separated into fact and fiction. His responses produce clues—the recognition of the second son from Ikaho Onsen, the names in the drawing, and the suggestion that he too may be an impostor—but stop short of a reliable explanation.

That uncertainty echoes the larger case. The dead man’s identity had been confirmed repeatedly through official records: marriage and death notifications, a driver’s license, health insurance, and pension contributions all treated him as Daisuké Taniguchi, though his appearance did not match the real man. Kido’s encounter with Omiura extends that contradiction from one person to the investigator’s potential witness. A name in a register may be administratively persuasive without settling who lived under it; even the broker who trades in identities cannot be securely identified by appearance or by the name he gives. Omiura therefore makes the investigation less a simple search for a hidden answer than a test of how far testimony and documents can establish a person’s continuity.