Kido–Sota father–son relationship

Kido and Sota’s father–son relationship is marked by genuine affection and an uncomfortable knowledge of its limits. Kido wants Sota to grow up certain that he was raised with love, yet one morning he loses his temper and frightens him. The incident breaks Kido’s belief that his compassion and good intentions place him beyond the reach of violence. His subsequent apology, care, and attention to Sota’s questions show an effort to repair their bond, while the relationship’s later connection to questions of doubles and fatherhood makes it part of the novel’s broader inquiry into identity and inheritance.

Identity and Background

Kido is Sota’s father, and their household is shaped by strain between Kido and his wife, Kaori. Kido knows he contributes to Kaori’s growing discontent, but retreats from trying to understand its deeper cause. What troubles him most is how the marital estrangement affects Sota. He has no elaborate theory of childrearing; he hopes simply that his son will one day feel sure he was raised with love.

That hope is complicated by Kido’s professional exposure to child-abuse cases in divorce proceedings. He feels for children harmed by their parents and tries to understand how a parent’s disposition and circumstances can shape harmful behavior. Until his own lapse, he regards himself as belonging to a fundamentally different category from those parents. The distinction depends less on a tested certainty than on his confidence that he would not become one of them.

The Morning Kido Loses His Temper

When Kaori leaves town, Sota’s frustration at the position his parents have placed him in finds an outlet. Kido has not expected disobedience from his son and has taken that history as evidence of a special relationship founded on mutual trust. Faced with Sota’s refusal to put on his socks, however, he becomes angry: he throws the socks at him and shouts for him to behave.

Kido’s gesture then crosses a line. He puts a hand on Sota’s head, realizes that he has struck him, and leaves his hand there, gripping his son in anger as if to conceal what he has done. Sota stops crying, frightened. Kido recognizes in his own grip the force of the violence he rejects, and the recognition turns the incident into more than an outburst: it challenges his understanding of himself.

After stepping away, Kido sees Sota put on his socks while sobbing. He hugs him until the crying stops and takes him to day care without speaking. Once Sota is inside, Kido is struck by sorrow and regret. He also recognizes that comforting his son after frightening him resembles the reconciliation phase in a pattern of domestic violence. This thought prevents the embrace from serving as easy absolution. His affection is real, but affection alone cannot make the preceding harm disappear.

Apology and Everyday Care

That evening, Kido collects Sota from day care at the Motomachi-Chukagai Station building. Sota runs to him smiling, and the teacher says he has had no problems during the day. The children bid one another goodbye with their familiar farewell before father and son leave together. The warmth of this ordinary reunion stands beside Kido’s memory of the morning, rather than undoing it.

At home, after spaghetti with meat sauce and frozen hamburger patties, Kido sits Sota on his lap before he can turn on the television and apologizes for shouting. Sota accepts the apology, though he is more eager to watch television than to discuss it. Kido explains that he was rushing because he thought he would be late for work, and that he became angry because he did not want Sota to be late for day care. He asks that they get ready faster the next morning; Sota agrees. Kido then lets him watch television, pats his head, and embraces him again. The exchange shows both the sincerity and the limits of the repair: Kido names his apology, but also frames his anger through the morning’s practical pressure, while Sota’s attention has already moved on.

After bath time, they lie in Sota’s room with the lights out. Sota asks whether Kido would know which of two versions of him was the real one. The question comes from a day-care picture book in which Baikinman pretends to be Anpanman. Its immediate source is play, but the idea of a double reaches beyond play in a story preoccupied with people living under borrowed identities. Here, the question becomes part of the intimacy between father and son: Sota brings Kido a puzzle about recognition, and their quiet conversation gives it a place in their relationship.

A Father’s Example and an Inherited Name

Kido’s relationship with Sota also finds a parallel in the account of Daisuké Taniguchi’s family. Daisuké applies himself to his father’s company in the hope of reassuring disappointed parents, but the family’s succession arrangement shifts when his older brother returns with debts. Daisuké anticipates carrying the business in practice, even while his brother receives the promised senior title. The account makes filial duty a question of unequal expectations: love for family can coexist with pressure and resentment.

When their father needs a live-donor liver transplant, Daisuké is the eligible son. He understands that donation can carry serious risks, and that his relatives have not explicitly released him from the obligation. He nevertheless consents as a free choice, wanting his father to live without holding the family’s pressure against them. His father thanks him, an exceptional expression of gratitude in their relationship. This family history gives added weight to the later discussion of what a father should give a son: a parent’s care is not only a matter of biological connection or family duty, but something conveyed through particular acts.

After the truth about the man Yuto knew as his father is disclosed, Rié asks what sort of person his father was. Yuto says he now understands why his father had been so kind: he thinks his father gave him what he had wanted his own father to give him. Rié agrees, but adds that he had also acted from care for Yuto himself. Their exchange distinguishes the influence of a parent’s earlier hurt from the love directed toward a child in the present. In the context of Kido and Sota, the distinction resonates: what a father inherits from his own past may shape his parenting, but does not exhaust what his care means to his child.

Change and Narrative Significance

Kido’s relationship with Sota is neither presented as an unbroken idyll nor reduced to the morning when Kido strikes him. Instead, the episode alters how Kido understands his own capacity for harm. Previously, he could sympathize with parents in abusive households while imagining himself safely outside their category. Afterward, he considers how different conditions might have made him a child beater, and experiences that possibility as a loss of faith in himself. His concern for Sota is therefore bound up with a newly serious recognition that good intentions do not guarantee safety.

Sota’s place in Kido’s life is also visible in Kido’s attention to the everyday particulars of care: getting him dressed and to day care, collecting him early, welcoming his happiness with the other children, praising him when he helps stop a fight, and returning to the morning’s rupture with an apology. At the park, Sota claims Kido as his father when other children crowd around him, then receives Kido’s gentle correction not to pull at them. Kido praises him when the children report that he helped resolve a quarrel. These small encounters show a bond expressed through both affection and guidance, not through a single declaration.

The relationship ultimately links intimate family life to the book’s larger questions about violence, identity, and the persistence of the past. Kido’s fear that he could have become a harmful parent unsettles any simple division between decent people and perpetrators; his conversations with Sota about doubles make recognition itself a familial question. And the story of a son who believes that a father gave him what he had lacked in childhood leaves room for inheritance without making it destiny. The bond between Kido and Sota is significant precisely because love is shown as something enacted and renewed, while remaining answerable to the moments when it fails.