Roman law

Roman law enters the novel as a historical analogy for legal continuity, not as a procedure that resolves the identity case. Kido uses the survival of Roman law after the fall of Rome to distinguish enduring legal entities from mortal individuals, sharpening the novel’s question of whether a person can be replaced as readily as a name or official record.

Legal Continuity and the Roman Example

In conversation with Misuzu, Kido explains that legal entities have been conceived as continuing through changes in their human representatives since Roman times. He points to the Roman Empire as the model: Roman law presupposed that the empire would continue eternally, yet the empire fell while its laws endured. The example separates an institution’s legal life from the lifespan of any particular person who serves it.

The Limit of the Analogy

Kido recognizes that he has digressed, but Misuzu is listening closely. He then marks the limit of his historical comparison: individuals are not legal entities, because human life has a finite span and ends in death. The distinction matters in a story where official identity has been exchanged and one man has lived under another’s name; legal continuity may preserve an identity in the record, but it cannot make one human being another. Kido underscores that limit by insisting that Hara is not Daisuké.

Identity, Records, and Legal Remedies

The Roman-law analogy resonates with the case Kido is handling for Rié. Her husband had been legally recorded as Daisuké Taniguchi: officials verified that identity when registering the marriage and later the death, and ordinary records of driving, medical care, and pension contributions supported it. Yet Daisuké’s brother recognized from a photograph that the deceased was not the man he knew. The discrepancy shows how legal recognition can sustain a public identity even when the person behind it is different.

The problem also exposes the consequences of a register’s classifications. The police did not investigate the dead husband’s identity; they instead accepted a missing-person report for Daisuké, then told Rié they could not investigate further. Kido proposed correcting the linked family registers through the Miyazaki Family Court: reverse the entry recording Daisuké’s death, remove his name from Rié’s register, and restore her maiden name. Because the marriage had been entered on the basis of mistaken identity, the proposed annulment would erase the marriage from her register and make Hana legally illegitimate. The court required Rié to appear and requested DNA testing, so Kido gathered hair, nail clippings, an electric razor, and a toothbrush from the deceased man’s belongings as samples.

A System That Makes People Legible

The novel broadens the case beyond one exchanged identity. Kido hears from Nakakita about children who lack family registers under the three-hundred-day rule: a child born within three hundred days of a divorce is legally attributed to the former husband. Some women in difficult circumstances avoid reporting a birth, leaving children absent from the register; after the tsunami, people omitted from official records could also be absent from the state’s accounting of the dead. In this formulation, the record does not merely describe a life. Its absence can leave both a person’s arrival and death outside official recognition.

Nakakita traces the register’s history from the Ritsuryo bureaucracy, where it served chiefly policing and taxation, through its expansion in the Edo period to record religious affiliation and details such as birth, marriage, adoption, address, occupation, and death. After freedom of movement made a land-based system obsolete, the modern register was used for conscription and tax collection, prompting some people to abandon or falsify records. Nakakita describes the resulting gaps as a system like Swiss cheese. He also links the register to Japan’s assimilation policies on the Korean Peninsula, which excluded people from full belonging when they were not included in its records.

In the present, Nakakita says identity management is conducted mainly through residence certificates and suggests that linking tax and social-security data through My Number could make the family register redundant. Kido replies that this could also make identity trading easier; biometrics might make the system nearly inescapable. Against this history of changing administrative systems, Roman law’s endurance offers a useful but limited comparison: laws and institutions may persist through transformation, while individuals remain vulnerable to the names, records, and categories through which the state recognizes them.