Miyazaki Family Court

Miyazaki Family Court is the court with jurisdiction over the family registers of households residing in Town S, and the forum in which Kido seeks to correct Rié’s records after the identity of her late husband is called into question. Its ruling resolves the administrative consequences of the deception: Rié’s second marriage is erased from her register, but the same correction changes Hana’s legal status.

Jurisdiction and the Disputed Record

The case arises because the man Rié knew as Daisuké Taniguchi had been legally recorded under that name through marriage and death, despite not being the real Daisuké. His identity had been accepted across official transactions: government records reflected his marriage and death, and he had used a driver’s license and health-insurance card and made pension contributions. Yet the real Daisuké’s brother recognized that the deceased man was not his sibling. The contradiction was not simply between a name and a face; it was between a coherent official record and the person whose identity that record purported to establish.

Rié first sought help from the police, but their response left the central question unresolved. The detective asked who had actually died, then confined the immediate action to filing a missing-person report for the real Daisuké. Two weeks later, the station told Rié that no matching person appeared on the missing-person list and said there was no way to investigate at that time. With no answer about her husband’s identity, she turned to Kido, who proposed sorting out the connection between her register and the Taniguchi family’s.

Petition and Evidence

Kido filed two requests with Miyazaki Family Court. First, he sought to cancel the record removing Daisuké Taniguchi from the register on account of death. Restoring that entry would make the real Daisuké legally alive in the records, so that the police would no longer be pursuing a person who was officially classified as dead. Second, he sought to remove the false Daisuké’s name from Rié’s register and restore her maiden name, Takemoto. The legal basis was annulment of the marriage on grounds of error; together, the changes would erase Rié’s second marriage from her family register.

The court required Rié to appear in person and requested DNA evidence to establish that X was not Daisuké Taniguchi. Kido collected possible samples from X’s belongings, including hair from his clothes, nail clippings, an electric razor, and a toothbrush. The request illustrates the gap the court had to bridge: the official documents treated the dead husband as Daisuké, while the petition argued that the person who had lived and died under that name was someone else.

Ruling and Consequences

Kido warned that a decision could take from two months to a year, and that rejection would require a lawsuit seeking a declaratory judgment that the marriage was invalid. Instead, both petitions were approved five months later, around the first week of August. The DNA test provided definitive evidence that X was not Daisuké Taniguchi. Rié’s second marriage was consequently removed from the records: legally, she was no longer a widow and had been married only once.

The correction did not simply restore an uncontested past. It also meant that Hana, Rié’s child with X, became legally illegitimate because the marriage that had provided the recorded basis for her status had been annulled. The ruling therefore has two distinct effects: it corrects the false identification and Rié’s marital record, while altering the legal description of the child born within that marriage. Rié experiences the corrected record as a profound disturbance, not a neat return to certainty, and loses a concrete sense of whose life she is living.

Institutional Significance

The court’s role gives family registration practical force. A name in the register can sustain a marriage, record a death, and determine which relationships the state recognizes; changing the entry alters those consequences even when it cannot undo the lived history behind them. Here, legal procedure offers a remedy that the police had not supplied, but that remedy carries consequences for the family as well as for the false identity.

The episode also sits within the novel’s wider concern with people whom official records fail to recognize. Kido later considers the possibility that an unregistered person could disappear from public accounting altogether: under the Civil Code’s three-hundred-day rule, some children born after divorce may be left without a family register when their births go unreported. He and Nakakita discuss how registration has served successive state purposes, from policing and taxation to identity management, while leaving some people outside its records. Against that background, the court’s work is both corrective and limited: it can revise the entries through which a person is officially legible, but those entries do not encompass the whole of a life.