Omiura’s postcards

Omiura’s postcards are the indirect and initially opaque means by which a prisoner tries to communicate with Kido, eventually directing the lawyer toward a possible connection between Daisuké Taniguchi, X, and the art of executed prisoner Kenkichi Kobayashi. Their importance lies as much in the difficulty of reading them as in what they suggest: each copied image invites interpretation, while the delay between sending and understanding leaves Kido unsure whether he has recognized a clue or merely imposed one.

Sequence and changing images

After Kido stopped pressing Omiura for an explanation and held back from contacting him, eight postcards arrived one after another. Each reproduced in ballpoint pen a nude photograph from an issue of Asahi Geino. The drawings were sloppy copies, but their repetition made them a sustained attempt at communication rather than a single isolated image. Studying them, Kido began to reconsider what he had dismissed in Omiura’s earlier stories.

The images changed. Omiura moved from copying the tabloid photograph to drawing the bodhisattva Kannon seated on a rock beside the water and looking at the moon’s reflection. Kido thanked him and requested another visit. Omiura replied at once, addressing the letter “Dear Korean!” and asking, “Are your eyes just empty holes, Handsome Lawyer Sensei? C-H-U-M-P!” The lines of the characters had been traced over repeatedly. Kido could not tell whether the greeting was friendly or mocking, and the taunt sharpened the question of whether he had failed to see something in the drawings.

Omiura then returned to raunchy images, but the source seemed to have changed from the tabloid photograph to a manga illustration of a middle-aged woman. When Kido looked closely, he found “Daisuké Taniguchi” written around one nipple and “Yoshihiko Sonézaki” around the other. Nakakita inferred that Omiura meant Yoshihiko Sonézaki was X. The names transformed the drawing into an apparent clue about two identities, although they did not, by themselves, prove that the two men had exchanged family registers.

From copies to a possible source

The postcards’ significance became clearer to Kido at an exhibition of works by prisoners sentenced to death. Among the remaining displays was a framed composition crowded with political rallying cries, including “DOWN WITH THE SECURITY TREATY!”, “BANZAI TO THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT!” and “NO SALES TAX INCREASE!” Within it were female nude illustrations whose composition and poses closely resembled those on Omiura’s postcards. Kido reversed his initial assumption: rather than the exhibition imitating Omiura, Omiura’s drawings appeared to imitate the works on display.

The same display included a hand-copied Heart Sutra, a text Omiura had asked Kido to obtain for him. That detail joined the exhibition to the correspondence, but it did not establish how Omiura had encountered the works. Kido wondered whether Omiura had seen the exhibition or read about it in a magazine. The connection remained an inference, not a confirmed account of how the images had reached him.

At the talk, the critic identified the landscape paintings as the work of Kenkichi Kobayashi, who had been executed twenty years earlier. Kido’s excitement faltered against a contradiction: the name he understood to be X’s was Yoshihiko Sonézaki, while the artist whose work seemed to resemble Omiura’s copies was long dead. He returned in thought to the names written around the image and to the letter calling him a chump. The drawings seemed to carry a hint, but he could not yet determine what the comparison with Kobayashi established or what Omiura expected him to understand.

What the postcards disclose about their sender

The sequence also causes Kido to reconsider Omiura’s purpose in telling him about his past. Earlier, Kido had regarded Omiura’s account of being raped in the pornographic film industry as farfetched. Faced with the repeated, hand-drawn images, he began to suspect that this experience may have been the story Omiura most wanted to convey—and that he might have been seeking legal advice, or simply compassion. The postcards do not confirm Omiura’s intention, but they make Kido recognize how readily he had treated a painful disclosure as another unreliable tale.

That recognition matters because Omiura’s communications do not arrive as a clear confession or a solved puzzle. Images are copied, changed, and annotated; a barbed letter refuses to spell out what the sender means. The form makes interpretation an act of attention, but it also leaves room for error. Kido’s later response shows that the correspondence has changed his approach: despite expecting Omiura to ignore him, he requests another visit and writes that he has researched the matter and now understands what the postcards were trying to convey. Omiura promptly agrees to meet, sending a letter without an illustration. For Kido, the sudden willingness to receive him is itself peculiar, and the exchange ends not with a fully verified explanation but with a new opening for one.