Makoto Hara lives as Daisuké Taniguchi and starts a family

Makoto Hara lives as Daisuké Taniguchi and starts a family is the tragic center of a borrowed identity: Hara’s impersonation allows him to build a life with Rié and become a father, but the truth emerges only after his death. Learning his real name does not simply restore a hidden fact. It forces Rié to reconsider the man she loved, the pain behind his deception, and the brief family life that gave his troubled existence its happiness.

Identity and the Life He Built

Hara took over being Daisuké, the missing Taniguchi son, and lived under that name with Rié. His life as Daisuké was not merely an assumed label attached to an otherwise separate existence: it became the identity through which he married, raised a family, and was known to those closest to him. The distinction between the man and the name therefore reaches into the ordinary intimacies of family life, where Rié’s memories of her husband had been formed around the identity he presented.

His years with Rié also included children. When Kido tells the real Daisuké that Hara had a child, Daisuké opens his eyes wide and looks toward the ceiling, momentarily absorbed by what he has heard. The detail makes the consequences of Hara’s assumed life tangible: the imposture had not only concealed one man from another but had become the setting for a family and for bonds that outlasted Hara himself.

The Truth Reaches Rié

After Hara’s death, the disclosure of his real identity changes how Rié can remember him. For a year, her late husband had gone without a name. When Kido’s report identifies him as Makoto Hara, she feels as if she is meeting him again. Yet naming him does not immediately settle her estrangement. The proper noun restores an essential truth, but Rié still has to decide what she can call the person she loved.

The age discrepancy makes that difficulty intimate. Rié learns that Hara was two years younger than she was, not two years older as she had believed. This finally explains why she had felt drawn to use the affectionate diminutive “kun,” but neither “Daisuké-kun” nor “Makoto-kun” feels immediately available to her. The former name seems like someone else’s possession; the latter belongs to a truth she cannot confirm by hearing him answer. Only after Kido leaves, when she can look at her husband’s pictures on her computer for the first time in a long while, does she feel that Hara would have wanted her to call him by his real name and love him as Makoto, not as Daisuké.

A Painful History and a Family’s Inheritance

Kido’s account gives Rié more than the fact of Hara’s identity. Reading about his sad life, she wonders whether the story of Daisuké had been Hara’s way of communicating the wounds he carried. She cannot know why he chose that particular means of telling her. She can, however, recognize the emotional truth beneath the distortion: a misrepresented cause does not make an injury or its pain unreal, even if the lie makes understanding and treatment more difficult.

The report also ties Hara’s past to Kenkichi Kobayashi’s murders, a connection Rié had not known about and struggles to absorb. The crimes are so horrifying that she hesitates over whether to show that portion to Yuto. Her fear is sharpened by the knowledge that Hara had agonized over his inherited connection to the killer. Rié is not troubled by the thought that a murderer’s blood runs in Hana’s veins, but she worries that Hana might one day despair if she learns the history. Yuto, by contrast, has no biological link to Hara, a difference that affects how cautiously Rié considers sharing the report.

The disclosure also brings back Kyoichi’s suggestion that Hara had committed a terrible crime. Rié imagines that Kyoichi might feel vindicated by learning Hara was the child of a killer, but the distinction matters: Hara himself had not committed those crimes. The report thus complicates the family’s history without making inherited guilt equivalent to personal wrongdoing. It reveals the fear Hara carried while preserving the belief Rié had wanted to hold—that her husband was not himself the perpetrator.

Love, Deception, and the Years Together

Rié asks herself whether she could have loved Hara if she had known his history from the start. She wants to believe love does not need the past, yet recognizes that, while grieving her own losses and raising Yuto, she might not have been able to embrace a partner with so tortured a history. There is no answer available after Hara’s death. What remains certain is that they fell in love through his lies and that their life together gave them Hana. Deception is neither erased nor made harmless by that outcome, but neither can the marriage be reduced to the deception that enabled it.

Kido gives Rié another way to understand those years when he tells her that the three years and nine months Hara spent with her were likely the first time he had known happiness—true joy—and the culmination of his life. His words reassure her more deeply than the report’s account of the facts. Kido has traveled to Town S to deliver a long written account in person, though a call or email would have sufficed; Rié recognizes that conveying this judgment is the reason for his visit, even though she chooses not to press him about his precise motive.

Narrative Significance

Hara’s family life makes the novel’s identity question personal rather than abstract. The name Daisuké gave him access to a shared life, but it also left Rié bereaved without the language to identify the person she had lost. Learning “Makoto Hara” opens a path toward recognition without undoing the past: Rié must hold together the man she remembers, the identity he borrowed, and the history he concealed.

The account refuses an easy choice between condemning the lie and celebrating the love. Rié’s family was formed under false pretenses, yet the affection and happiness within it were real; Hara’s inherited history shaped his fear, yet it did not make him guilty of his father’s crimes. The decisive aftermath is therefore not a clean restoration of truth but the difficult work of naming someone fully, while accepting that the life they shared was both built on concealment and, for Hara, the brief culmination of a lifetime.