Shimatsumi

Yokkaichi is both the setting of Kenkichi Kobayashi’s 1985 murders and the place of his birth, joining the crime that marked Makoto Hara’s childhood to the history of the father who committed it. In Kido’s investigation, the city is not merely a point on a map: its remembered landscapes and fragmented records make the past return as something at once recognizable and difficult to fully know.

Setting and the 1985 murders

In 1985, Kobayashi went to the home of an acquaintance who ran a construction company to demand money. After being refused, he returned later that night, robbed the house, killed the acquaintance and the man’s wife and child, and set the house on fire. The crimes took place in Yokkaichi, in Mie Prefecture. Kobayashi stole ¥136,000, an amount described as enough for two months’ rent, and was arrested a week later.

The acquaintance was not a stranger to Kobayashi: they had met through a local children’s club attended by Makoto. That connection brings the crime into the everyday social world of the city, where a community association linked the perpetrator to the family he would later attack. News coverage brought reporters to Yokkaichi in large numbers, and Makoto’s mother soon left town with her son.

Kobayashi’s origins and Makoto’s childhood

Kobayashi was born in Yokkaichi in 1951. His childhood was marked by poverty and violence at home; as a teenager he became delinquent, left high school, and eventually found work at a local factory. At twenty-one he married, and three years later his only child, Makoto, was born. Kobayashi abused his wife and son, though outsiders could have regarded the family as typical until Makoto was five.

As Kobayashi approached thirty, a renewed association with a middle-school acquaintance drew him into gambling and debt. By the time of the 1985 murders, debt collectors had reportedly been pursuing him for some time. The account provides this history as context for the crimes, not as an excuse for them: Kido remains conscious both of the chain of circumstances and of the irreducible harm done to the victims.

A city encountered through memory

Kido first responds to Yokkaichi through images at an exhibition of work by prisoners. A group of modest landscapes—a stream among hills and fields, birds and cherry trees, and an old-town street with a mailbox and utility poles—strikes him as strangely familiar. He learns that their maker was the perpetrator of the 1985 Yokkaichi murder and arson case. Because Kido was ten at the time, the news begins to stir indistinct memories of the incident, though he cannot initially explain why the pictures seem known to him.

The landscapes’ unassuming quality contrasts with the violence associated with their maker. Their importance to Kido is not that they resolve the past, but that they unsettle his sense of what he remembers: recognition arrives before explanation, and the connection between a child’s memories and another child’s traumatic history takes shape only gradually.

The city’s continuing significance

Yokkaichi connects the public history of a notorious crime with the private consequences borne by Makoto. After his mother left town, he was later recorded as living in an orphanage in Maebashi, and little was known about what followed. The city thus marks the point from which Makoto’s life became difficult for outsiders to trace, as well as the setting of the act that would remain central to Kido’s later effort to understand him.

The narrative also returns to Kobayashi’s beginnings in Yokkaichi while Kido considers how violence can emerge from a history of deprivation and abuse. Kido can imagine the danger to his own family and fears what might happen to his wife and son, yet he does not treat that fear as proof that Kobayashi’s history is a complete explanation. Yokkaichi holds these perspectives together: the local circumstances preceding the murders, the crime’s lasting consequences, and the limits of what memory or biography can make comprehensible.