Midlife existential anxiety

Midlife existential anxiety in Kido’s story is not simply fear of growing older: it is the disorientation that follows when death makes a settled life look contingent, and the identity built around that life no longer feels secure. The 2011 earthquake and the sudden death of a young friend bring back questions Kido thought he had outgrown. At thirty-eight, he finds that the question of who he is has changed tense. It is no longer only a question of how to live, but of what his life has already made him, and what will remain when it ends.

The first return of uncertainty

Kido’s anxiety emerges against the texture of ordinary professional and family life. At his firm, he and the other lawyers discuss the growing prevalence of middle-aged depression. As a joke with a serious underside, Kido proposes that they “gather evidence” to reassure themselves that they are not terrible people, should they someday fall into bottomless self-loathing. The suggestion makes self-judgment sound almost like a case to be prepared in advance: a person might need proof, assembled from small actions, against a future conviction of worthlessness.

A small encounter gives this idea an immediate, humane form. After exchanging a soft smile with a pregnant woman, Kido tells her to take care; the casual warmth of his response lingers with him. He thinks of the child she is carrying, who will never know of their brief interaction, and of the many anonymous acts of goodwill such a child will need in order to enter the world and grow up safely. Kido takes comfort in having contributed one such act. This is not a grand achievement or a solution to his unease, but a modest piece of evidence that he has done some good.

His thoughts about X unsettle that reassurance. Since hearing Rié’s account, Kido finds himself returning to the man while walking, riding the train, and sharing meals with his family. X’s story repeats in his mind like a melody that will not stop playing. The thought of beginning again as an entirely different person had never appealed to Kido as a real possibility; youthful wishes to become someone admired by a girl he liked had remained passing fantasies. But X has made such a change of identity concrete. His case stirs a troubling recognition: the desire to abandon one life for another need not come only from misery. It can arise when happiness is interrupted by ennui, too.

Death makes the question personal

The death of Kido’s former fellow legal apprentice gives his fear a face and a family. Kido is accustomed to attending the funerals of older relatives and acquaintances, but this friend has died while still young, leaving a wife and two elementary-age daughters. At the funeral, the family weeps, and Kido regrets that he cannot find words of condolence that would mean anything. After he leaves the funeral home, the reality of the death dissolves again into the incredulity he felt when he first heard the news. The passage between knowing that someone has died and feeling the fact as real is itself part of the shock.

The friend’s death makes Kido imagine his own absence. He pictures Sota hearing from his mother that his father is dead, and the child’s baffled question. Kido imagines being unable to answer or explain death to his son: once dead, he could not teach Sota what death means. He recognizes that he does not want to die and cannot consent to the thought simply because death is inevitable. He gives the mood that has lingered since the earthquake a name: existential anxiety.

What frightens him is not only the instant of dying, but the complete break between his consciousness and the world that continues afterward. Kido imagines that, as soon as he died, he would no longer be able to think or feel, while time carried on for the living without any connection to him. The more than fifteen thousand people killed in the tsunami two years earlier can perceive nothing of the present, he reflects; they have left nothing substantial through which to participate in it. This recognition makes him acutely sensitive to the minutiae of life. The everyday world feels more precious because its continuity is not guaranteed to include him.

The Nankai Trough earthquake gives that vulnerability a concrete, immediate shape. Kido imagines it striking while he is on the bullet train and sending the train off its track. The possibility has been repeatedly discussed since the disaster, but in his thoughts it is no longer an abstract public risk: it is a way he might vanish in the next instant, without preparation or understanding. The possibility of a sudden end intensifies his attention to the life he presently inhabits.

A different question about the self

Kido has faced questions of identity before. As a teenager, while trying to decide what he wanted to become and what kind of person he was, he eventually drifted into law on his father’s advice. Doubts about whether it was truly the right path never entirely disappeared, but he kept looking ahead and trusted that the person he was meant to be would emerge through his chosen profession. Back then, asking who he was served the hope of finding a way to live.

For fifteen years, Kido treated that period of philosophical uncertainty as a developmental stage he had already passed through. His confidence in professional life also belonged to a particular social world: he knew from his clients that stable work was becoming less common and that many people were denied the security and income through which he had expected to realize himself. The earthquake disrupts the story he had told himself about having settled the question. He can no longer clearly say what he discovered about himself, and the old question returns in a changed form: did he make the right choice?

At middle age, Kido understands his life as a sequence of stages joined by a shared name, with the present self as their culmination. A substantial part of the life once waiting ahead under the label “Akira Kido” has already become past. Other paths could have produced other versions of him, perhaps countless ones, but those alternatives now exist as lives not taken. The problem has shifted from who he is at this moment to who he has been across the life already lived. The answer he seeks is no longer meant to help him choose how to live; it is meant to help him understand what kind of person he will die as.

His concern about the future is also bound to Sota’s memory. Kido wonders whether he will live to be seventy-one, when Sota will be thirty-eight, and hopes that he will. If he does not, he wonders what kind of father his son will remember him as he is now. Death therefore threatens not only Kido’s private consciousness but also the continuity of his identity through another person’s recollection. His anxiety asks what survives when the living person is gone, without assuming that memory can restore the person who died.

Public insecurity and private life

Kido’s unease extends from mortality to the conditions that make a life feel protected. The judicial order he works to preserve sustains ordinary existence and safeguards the human rights and civic status of him and his family. Yet he worries that an extreme rupture could override that order in a particular time and place. The danger is not limited to an imagined catastrophe: he has watched ultraright demonstrators shout “Death to Koreans!” and seen publishers fill bookstores with anti-Chinese and anti-Korean titles. Such developments make his status as a naturalized citizen of Zainichi Korean background feel newly exposed, even though he initially tells himself that he is exaggerating the insecurity attached to his ethnicity.

He also questions the purity of his own response. Kido considers whether his concern for society is partly performative, like a conscientious student displaying virtue, while recognizing that it also comes from compassion. Trying to measure how much of his conduct is sincere and how much is a pretense to goodness seems futile. His uncertainty is therefore ethical as well as personal: the wish to believe himself decent cannot be separated cleanly from the wish to appear decent, and the existence of that ambiguity does not erase the possibility of genuine care.

He ultimately judges that Japan’s dark prospects weigh more heavily on him than his individual identity does. Perhaps, he thinks, some of his anxiety is the banal, petit-bourgeois worry of an age in which even lawyers struggle to put food on the table. This qualification does not cancel his fear. It places it among social and historical pressures rather than treating it as an isolated private crisis.

That public and inward disquiet carries Kido toward a more direct question about his household. He decides he should talk with Kaori, who must also feel unsettled by the earthquake, and wishes to restore their home to the way it had been. But the thought he has been avoiding is simpler and more painful than the abstract questions he has been turning over: perhaps his wife no longer loves him. Their relationship, he recognizes, has been gradually falling apart, and its pattern resembles the marriages whose negotiations he handles as a lawyer. His existential anxiety thus reaches beyond speculation about death. It presses him to face the choices and relationships of a life still in progress, before that life becomes something he can only try to understand in retrospect.