Kyoichi–Daisuké brotherhood

Kyoichi and Daisuké Taniguchi’s brotherhood is defined by a painful contradiction: Kyoichi has long been reluctant to search for his missing younger brother, but he cannot accept the possibility that Daisuké has simply vanished from the family’s concern. His guilt and guardedness coexist with anger, speculation, and a persistent demand for answers. As the investigation unfolds, the brothers’ relationship becomes the measure of what the family has lost—and a source of competing explanations for Daisuké’s disappearance.

Family Bond and the Missing Brother

Daisuké’s disappearance after the earthquake leaves Kyoichi with a question he cannot settle. He argues that, if his brother were alive, he would have contacted the family, unless his life had become so difficult that he could not face them. The thought keeps the possibility of Daisuké’s survival open, but makes silence itself feel like evidence of distress.

Kyoichi is also conscious of the difference between a family’s experience of a disappearance and the police’s routine treatment of missing-person cases. Once the police abandon the search, he is outraged at the opportunity, partly because he resents the detective in charge and partly because the decision reassures him that the case is unlikely to attract wider attention. When Kido tells him that the family-register records have been updated to show Daisuké as alive and unmarried, Kyoichi begins to treat the disappearance as a matter the family must handle internally. That shift offers some relief, but it also leaves the burden of finding Daisuké with the people closest to him.

Reluctance, Guilt, and Family Pressure

Kyoichi has shown little initiative in searching, wary of uncovering trouble. Their mother challenges that inaction: in tears, she urges him to make a greater effort because she desperately wants to see her younger son again before she dies. Her appeal makes the search more than an investigation. It is an obligation to their mother and a chance to restore a family connection that may otherwise be lost for good.

Kyoichi’s conduct therefore resists a simple reading as indifference. He avoids pushing too far, yet he reacts strongly to the idea that Daisuké has been harmed and is distressed by the possibility of what may have happened to him. His reluctance appears bound up with fear of what the search might uncover; his mother’s plea makes that fear harder to use as a reason for doing nothing.

The Search and the Osaka Lead

Kido finds an address attached to Daisuké’s family-register records: a very cheap, deteriorating apartment on the Yodo River in Osaka City’s Kita district. Kido proposes that he, Rié, and Kyoichi go there together. Before Rié can answer, however, Kyoichi says he has business in Osaka and visits the building-management company on his own, meeting its president.

The president studies a photograph of Daisuké and says he is fairly certain Daisuké lived in the apartment. When Kyoichi shows him a picture of X as well, the man says that face is unfamiliar. According to Kyoichi, this suggests that Daisuké was still living under his own name at the Osaka address before encountering X and losing his name and family-register identity. Kyoichi is newly enraged at the police, believing that a basic inquiry could have brought this information to light.

He asks the president for Daisuké’s phone number and forwarding address, supposing these may have been recorded when Daisuké left. The president, who had initially been cooperative, becomes wary and says evasively that he is unsure whether the files still exist but will look. Kyoichi understands the man’s caution about becoming involved in trouble, but hears nothing further from him. The lead brings the brothers closer to an account of how Daisuké’s identity may have been taken, without resolving where Daisuké himself went.

Speculation and Allegiance

Even after Kyoichi undertakes the Osaka inquiry, he continues to insist that Daisuké must have been murdered. He floats the possibility that North Korean agents had “piggybacked” his brother, a theory Kido doubts. Kyoichi does not insist on that particular explanation when challenged; instead, he maintains that, if Daisuké was murdered, some nefarious turn of events must have led to it. He is unsettled by imagining such a fate for someone like his brother. The details of the theory shift, but the conviction beneath it remains: Daisuké could not simply have disappeared without something terrible happening.

Kyoichi’s protectiveness is complicated by the limited effort he has made to find Daisuké and by his relief that the police have stopped looking. Those responses sit uneasily beside his anger at their failure to investigate and his insistence that his brother’s disappearance must have a sinister cause. The contradiction gives the brotherhood its unresolved tension: Kyoichi wants an explanation, but fears the consequences of pursuing one.

Hara and the Unresolved Disappearance

Months later, Kido contacts Kyoichi to explain what he has uncovered about Makoto Hara. Kido wants to understand Hara’s nine-year gap between leaving the club and meeting Rié, and in particular to establish whether Hara harmed Daisuké during that period. He sees help from the Taniguchi family as important to locating the missing brother.

Kyoichi’s response is immediate: he takes the new information as confirmation of his suspicion that Hara killed Daisuké, and points to Hara’s father, a convicted murderer, as part of the reason he distrusts him. Kido cautions against assuming that Hara committed murder, arguing that Hara wanted to escape his family background and be accepted by society, goals that killing someone would undermine. Kyoichi counters that Hara could have concealed such an act, and that a person with his background might have acted unpredictably. Their disagreement turns the search into a conflict over how to interpret both Hara and Daisuké’s absence: Kido argues from what Hara stood to lose, while Kyoichi gives greater weight to the possibility of hidden violence.

No definitive resolution of Daisuké’s fate emerges from these encounters. The Osaka account supports the possibility that X took his identity, but does not establish what happened to him afterward; Kyoichi’s suspicion about Hara remains an accusation rather than a confirmed answer. The brothers’ bond thus persists less through shared action than through the questions Kyoichi cannot put aside. His investigation and anger testify to attachment, while his fear and hesitation keep that attachment from becoming a straightforward search for reunion.