Makoto Hara’s death in a logging accident

Makoto Hara’s death in a logging accident is the irreversible end of the life he had built while living as Daisuké Taniguchi. Its aftermath does not resolve the difference between the two men: the real Daisuké is alive but officially missing, while Hara’s friends grieve a man many knew by the borrowed name. Through a conversation about the accident and a visit to a nearby logging site, the loss becomes at once intimate and material—a death within a dangerous industry shaped by land claims, market pressures, and a forest’s long passage from mountain to house.

The accident and its immediate aftermath

When Kido tells Daisuké that the facts have come to light and the notification of Daisuké’s death has been annulled, Daisuké reacts with a sour expression and seems to reconsider what Hara’s death means. His question is not about the legal correction alone: he asks what Hara got himself into after taking over Daisuké’s identity. The change in official status makes the substitution newly consequential. Daisuké is alive and listed as missing, but Hara is dead, and the life he led under Daisuké’s name cannot simply be returned to its former owner.

Kido recounts Hara’s life from meeting Rié in Town S to his death. Daisuké listens solemnly, smoking one cigarette after another with his arms crossed. When Kido mentions that Hara had a child, Daisuké opens his eyes wide and looks up at the ceiling, absorbing a family dimension of the borrowed life he had not previously known. His abrupt question about whether Hara’s wife was attractive shifts the exchange into awkward, ordinary curiosity without diminishing the weight of the disclosure: the dead man had not merely worn another name, but had become a husband and father within it.

A workplace shaped by risk

Kido visits a logging site with Ito, whose company works in an industry where danger persists despite mechanization. Ito explains that the site they are visiting is not the one where Hara died, though it is similar and relatively close. The distinction matters: Kido is approaching the circumstances of the death through a comparable place, not claiming to stand at the precise scene of the fatal accident.

Ito describes the business behind the work. Ito Lumber logs national forests after purchasing the rights and is booked for two years, while the industry depends on government subsidies and struggles to compete with imported materials. Biomass generators have made all wood saleable, leaving the market in decent shape, though not booming. Against those pressures, Ito warns that some cut-rate crews log illegally and exploit uncertain ownership. As mountain land becomes unwanted even by heirs, claims proliferate; crews may buy a small adjoining plot and cut trees from land whose owner cannot be established. The disordered chain of family-register claims is not a distant legal complication: it makes the resource itself vulnerable to extraction and leaves responsibility difficult to pin down.

Ito’s own account of Hara’s accident is marked by regret. He says he still prays before the altar every morning and blames himself because he had never seen a major accident since taking over the company from his father. Hara’s death came after Ito accepted a poorly conditioned site for a client he felt unable to refuse. He was not present when the accident happened. Even experienced workers can misread the direction a tree will fall, Ito explains, especially when it is bent; he tells the crews every morning to be careful. Forestry’s risks include not only falling trees but machinery slipping off cliffs, snakes, and wasps, and Ito estimates that accidents are extraordinarily common.

The forest’s time and the human cost

At the worksite, a long-necked orange machine grips logs, lifts them, and strips their branches. Beyond the cleared space and the stumps, the ground falls away at a steep slope. Ito says trees are typically cut at about fifty years old, then used as building materials that may serve for another fifty years. He asks his workers to think of each tree as having a hundred-year span: fifty years on the mountain and fifty years with people. That measured account of use and duration stands beside the suddenness of Hara’s death. A tree’s working life can be described in half-centuries; a worker’s safety can still hinge on a single difficult fall.

Ito’s grief is not isolated to the company president. Kido recognizes that Hara’s friends mourn him deeply, whether they knew him as Daisuké or knew his real name, as the president of the boxing club did. No one speaks badly of him. The name attached to their memories varies, but their loss converges on the same person. Hara’s death therefore leaves more than a vacancy in one household: it exposes the emotional reality of the life he made under an assumed identity, even as the correction of Daisuké’s death record restores the distinction on paper.

Significance of the death

The accident makes the difference between a person and the identity recorded for him both visible and unresolved. Hara’s borrowed name enabled him to build a family and be known within a community; after his death, that community’s mourning cannot be undone by the revelation that he was not Daisuké. At the same time, the real Daisuké’s survival changes the meaning of Hara’s final years, forcing him to hear what another man did while living as him.

The visit to Ito’s logging operation widens the event without turning it into an abstract symbol. Its risks are specific: a bent tree that falls unpredictably, a site accepted despite poor conditions, a client Ito felt unable to refuse, and a president who continues to pray and blame himself. Around that fatal risk are broader conditions—subsidies, imported competition, mechanized work, and disputed mountain ownership. The death is personal, but its account insists on the physical labor and economic arrangements through which that danger becomes ordinary. Hara’s life cannot be transferred back with a name, and the grief left by his death cannot be assigned neatly to only one identity.