Ri Hi tells Yuto that her husband used a false identity

Rié’s disclosure to Yuto turns a long-standing absence into a crisis of identity: the father whose grave has not been made, and whose stories shaped Yuto’s childhood, lived under another man’s name. The conversation gives Yuto the truth Rié can establish, but not the answer he wants. His father’s identity remains unresolved, and even the family name Yuto carries is suddenly uncertain.

The question that prompts the disclosure

Another anniversary of his father’s death has passed without a grave. At the park, where Rié stands before the tree her husband had chosen among the many planted there, Yuto tells her that the anniversary has come and gone again. His controlled voice makes clear that he will not accept another vague reply. The missing grave is not simply a matter of mourning: Rié cannot settle where or how to memorialize a man whose real identity she does not know.

Rié says she has been keeping something from him. The confession begins not with a complete account of the past, but with its central fact: his father’s name was not really Daisuké Taniguchi. After the man died, the real Daisuké’s brother visited and told Rié that the deceased was not his brother. The family’s private history is thus unsettled by an outside confirmation, and the name that had organized their lives is revealed as borrowed.

What Rié can and cannot tell him

When Yuto asks who his father was, Rié explains that she has been trying to find out. She went to the police and hired a lawyer, but neither effort has yet given her the man’s real name. Her answer links the investigation to her inability to make a grave: the lack of a secure identity is not an abstract puzzle but an obstacle in the family’s mourning. She does not pretend to know more than she does, even as she acknowledges that she delayed telling him because she hoped the facts would become clearer.

Yuto immediately extends the revelation to himself. If his father used another man’s name, what does it mean that Yuto is called Taniguchi? Rié tells him that Taniguchi was simply a name his father used for a time, belonging to someone they do not know. When Yuto asks whether this is why she returned to her maiden name, Rié nods. The disclosure therefore reaches beyond the dead man’s biography: it touches Yuto’s own name and clarifies the reason for Rié’s changed legal identity.

A childhood story reassigned

Yuto recalls his father’s account of a home in Ikaho Onsen, a quarrel with his family, and a flight that brought him to their town. Rié does not leave this cherished story suspended as a possible version of the truth. Looking Yuto in the eye, she tells him that it was not his father’s past but Daisuké Taniguchi’s. The account remains part of Yuto’s childhood, but its ownership changes: it belonged to the real Taniguchi, not to the man who told it as his own.

Yuto understands the reassignment as a betrayal. He asks whether his father lied and, after Rié gives two slight nods, protests that the deception reached all of them. He wants to know why his father lied and what he had done. Rié cannot supply a motive or an explanation; she tells Yuto she knows no more than he does. The exchange sets the clear fact of impersonation against the continuing blank around the impersonator’s original identity and reasons.

Consequences and significance

The disclosure changes the terms of their shared past without resolving it. Yuto has to reconsider both the name he bears and a personal story through which his father had explained his own arrival and estrangement. Rié, in turn, stops protecting him with incomplete answers, but honesty cannot restore the certainty the family once attached to the name Taniguchi. It replaces one account with a distinction between what is known and what remains unknowable.

The scene also joins remembrance to the problem of naming. Yuto’s wish to speak to his father at the grave has been held back by the absence of one; Rié’s account explains why she cannot yet make one, while leaving the grief itself intact. When Hana comes over holding Grandma’s hand, the conversation ends without a solution or a final explanation. Mother and son remain together in silence, carrying a truth that clarifies the deception but cannot yet identify the man behind it.