Lives can be exchanged, but death cannot be replaced

Lives can be exchanged, but death cannot be replaced: this distinction gives shape to the novel’s account of borrowed identities and bereavement. Makoto Hara can live under Daisuké Taniguchi’s name, and the real Daisuké can imagine giving his life to someone worthy of it. But Rié’s loss of Ryo makes the limit unmistakable. Another person may inherit a name or a life’s outward course; the death that belongs to one person cannot be transferred, reversed, or made someone else’s.

Exchange and family obligation

Daisuké’s experience first makes exchange seem possible as a matter of family duty. When his father develops advanced liver cancer, a transplant from a relative appears to be the only chance of survival. Daisuké’s older brother is disqualified because of a fatty liver, while Daisuké is healthy. The burden falls on the son whose more restrained life has left him medically eligible, even as the family’s expectations have already assigned the brothers unequal places in their parents’ affections and the family business.

The request is not a simple command, but neither is Daisuké free of pressure. His father takes his hand, bows, and asks him to fulfill his duty as a son; his mother and brother do not tell him he may refuse. They discuss the situation when he is absent, and he walks into those meetings at the hospital. He understands why they hope for the transplant and wants his father to live, yet the operation carries risks for the donor as well as the recipient, including death. His eventual consent is framed as a choice he makes freely rather than a surrender to family pressure: he will give his liver without resentment.

His father is overjoyed, thanks him—the only time he ever does so—and Daisuké’s brother promises him the entire inheritance. Those gestures seem to promise that the sacrifice might repair old imbalances in the family. But the cancer has already advanced too far. The transplant becomes impossible, and the father dies wearing an expression that Daisuké remembers as nearly hateful. The family grieves together, yet neither his mother nor his brother offers comfort for the decision that proved futile. Daisuké is left with relief that he did not have to undergo the operation and with the sense that something in him has broken beyond repair. He cuts off contact with his family and leaves town.

Borrowed lives and the meaning of a name

The other side of the idea appears in Hara’s life as Daisuké Taniguchi. The real Daisuké, having severed ties with his family, meets Hara while Hara is living under the name Yoshihiko Sonézaki. Hara tells him that he was once a boxer and had made two suicide attempts. Daisuké says that Hara listened closely to his story and wanted to help make the most of the life he had left. They meet only twice, but Daisuké feels drawn to Hara’s purity and to his urgent wish to change course before his time in the world runs out.

Daisuké’s name is attractive to people arranging identity exchanges because its family register has no criminal record and a clean past. One prospective exchanger keeps trading for better registers in the hope of obtaining it. Daisuké, who wants above all to cut himself off from his family, is willing to exchange identities, but he draws a line at giving the name to a criminal or to someone who might scheme for the Taniguchi inheritance. Hara seems different to him: someone who might use a borrowed identity to turn over a new leaf. The exchange makes a new life possible in the practical sense, but it does not make the two men’s histories or deaths interchangeable.

Rié’s reflections sharpen that difference. Her husband has lived another man’s life, so she can accept that a life may be exchanged. Death, however, seems to her to be the one thing that cannot be exchanged with anyone. Ryo’s death has taught her this not as an abstract proposition but as a limit she encounters in grief: she cannot die in his place, however genuinely she wishes she could. Only Ryo could die his own death; Rié’s own death remains hers to face in the future.

Ryo’s death and the limits of substitution

The force of the idea comes from the particular circumstances of Ryo’s illness and death. After his parents learn that the suffering they have imposed on him was pointless, Rié looks back on the time they might have spent differently: giving him his favorite foods, taking him to the zoo he loved, spoiling him, and teaching him the joy of living while he could. Her remorse does not offer a way to exchange places with him or reclaim the days they lost. It makes the irreversibility of his death more painful, because the possibility of a gentler life can now be imagined only after it is too late.

Rié remembers Ryo’s tender innocence, including the earnest way he answered the doctor’s encouragement with “Yes, sir” rather than a casual yes. His father had drilled the response into him, and the child continued to offer it while sitting on the edge of his bed with his hands in his lap. After his hair fell out and his face became swollen, Rié still remembered that obedient expression. The memory joins affection to regret: what remains of Ryo is not a life that another person can take over, but a child’s particular gestures and the parents’ knowledge of what they did and failed to do.

When Rié learns that recovery will never come, her body seems to move toward a frenzy in which feeling might cease. Yet even the wish to die for a sick child cannot make death transferable. She prays to no one in particular for a miracle, but Ryo alone can die the death that is his. The thought does not console her; it marks the boundary between loving someone and being able to save, replace, or follow them.

The dead, the name, and what remains

After her husband’s death, Rié turns the question of exchange toward identity: the family-register records say that a man named Daisuké Taniguchi has died, but that name belongs to the real Daisuké as well as to the life her husband inhabited. She wonders who her husband really was and whose death he died. The question does not deny that he died; it exposes how an exchanged identity makes the official name an uncertain guide to the person lost.

Rié resists Kido’s practical use of X for her late husband. To her, assigning someone a code name without his permission diminishes his human dignity and makes him feel like a stranger under discussion. Yet she has no real name to use in its place. She remembers calling him Papa or Father in front of the children and Daisuké-kun when they were alone, a familiar form of address that seemed to fit his youthful character. But Daisuké is also the name of a stranger. Even the intimate name she used in moments of deepest love carries the identity he borrowed, leaving her unable to call him back with certainty.

The thought that the dead cannot call out to the living, and can only wait to be called, gives naming an ethical force. A dead person whose name is unknown may sink further into solitude, uncaught by anyone’s speech. For Rié, remembering her husband therefore means trying to address a person she loved without knowing how much of the name she used belonged to him. Her mourning is bound to a problem no register can resolve: a name can be borrowed and a life can be inhabited, but neither fact supplies a substitute for the person who died.

What can pass to the living

The distinction continues into the family’s future through Yuto. When Rié plans to return to her maiden name, Yuto asks to remain Yuto Taniguchi. His name has already changed as the family moved from Yoneda to Takemoto and then Taniguchi; at middle school, classmates and students around him know him as Taniguchi. He also feels that changing it again would be wrong to the father whose family turned away from him, and fears that they might forget him too. The name becomes something Yuto can preserve, not proof that he can restore the dead.

When Yuto recognizes that his father was kind to him partly because he had wanted his own father to treat him that way, Rié confirms that this was not the whole explanation: he also cared about Yuto. That inheritance is not an exchange of lives. It is a form of care that survives in the child’s understanding of the person he called Dad. Across Daisuké’s failed attempt to save his father, Hara’s adoption of another man’s identity, Rié’s unfulfilled wish to die for Ryo, and Yuto’s insistence on keeping Taniguchi, the novel distinguishes what may pass from one person to another from what cannot. Names, obligations, and ways of loving endure or change; each death remains irreducibly its own.