Sincerity and love realized through lies

Sincerity and love realized through lies is a central tension in the novel: Kido and Rié confront the possibility that an invented life can still carry genuine feeling, while neither can treat the deception as harmless. Kido describes lying as a way of inhabiting other people’s pain without surrendering himself entirely; Rié, grieving a husband who lived under another man’s name, cannot separate the love she experienced from the false past through which she came to know him. Their questions remain unresolved, and that uncertainty is the point: a lie may enable intimacy, but it cannot make the hidden truth disappear.

Kido’s practice of living through others

Kido tells the narrator that he keeps himself together by living other people’s pain. He compares the practice to the saying about a man who goes mummy hunting ending up a mummy himself: the search for another person’s story risks changing the seeker, too. He calls his behavior a way of being honest through lies, but qualifies the claim. He can do it during brief encounters, he says, without letting go of himself entirely. The contradiction is both his method and its limit: he enters other people’s suffering, yet keeps a boundary between their histories and his own.

He admits that what he truly wants is to think directly about himself, but that doing so makes him sick. He has tried everything he can, and hopes his need to act this way will eventually pass. His account is not a boast that deception grants him freedom; it is a description of a distressing habit he cannot simply choose to stop. The narrator finds his manner deliberately mysterious and his conduct tasteless, but is also fascinated by what he has said and cannot deny a growing affection for him. That response holds together discomfort and attraction rather than allowing either to cancel the other.

Kido then promises that he will tell the narrator the truth from then on. The promise gives their relationship a fragile point of contrast: his opening has depended on a lie, but he offers honesty as a commitment in the present. The narrator experiences him beyond this confession as unaffected, affable, and collected, with a sensitive, receptive mind. Their conversation feels unusually easy: each understands what the other means, and they share a love of music. These qualities do not explain away the lie. Instead, they make the narrator feel that there must be circumstances behind Kido’s need to deceive.

The past as a story, not a complete possession

Kido’s reflection on love begins with Rié’s late husband and expands into a problem of knowing anyone. The present person, he reasons, is the result of a past that helped make them; different circumstances might have made that person different. Yet no one can communicate an entire past to another, and a past explained in words is never the past itself. This gap exists even without deliberate fraud. A person’s account can diverge from what happened, and Kido wonders whether love based on that account must therefore be mistaken—or whether an intentional lie might give rise to a new love instead.

His thoughts about Kaori make the question personal in another direction. She has remained near the place where she grew up, attended Keio University nearby, and stayed in contact with friends from middle and high school. She has told Kido memories reaching back to childhood, which he knows well and has never suspected might be lies. He recognizes that, had she narrated a stranger’s life as her own, he would probably have believed her just the same; the story would have shaped his understanding of the person he thought she was. Meanwhile, Kaori might have had more reason to doubt his own past, since he grew up far away. His early disclosure that he was third-generation Zainichi gave her a reason to regard him as sincere, but even disclosure itself becomes part of the story by which trust is formed.

These reflections do not make truth irrelevant. They expose how much love already depends on narrated versions of a person, and how little any lover can verify of another’s entire history. The difference between an incomplete account and a deliberate false identity matters, but it does not automatically determine whether the feelings formed through it were genuine. Kido’s questions make room for both injury and attachment: the story can mislead, while the love arising within it can still be real.

Rié’s love addressed to another name

After her husband’s death, Rié kneels before his photograph on the household altar, unable to find words that might make him turn around. In front of the children she had called him Papa or Father; in private she called him Daisuké-kun. The familiar suffix had an unexpectedly youthful quality, as if she were addressing a boy from elementary school. Yet Daisuké was the name of a complete stranger. The name she had used in intimacy had become a reminder that she had been loving someone under an identity that was not his own.

Rié remembers saying his name in the moments when her love was deepest and the distance between them smallest. With no one else present, there had been no need to distinguish him from anyone else; precisely then, she had called him by the other man’s name. She imagines her affection filling that name and lingering around him. The intimacy is not erased by what she learns, but its meaning changes: the name was false as a statement of identity, yet it became inseparable from the tenderness she genuinely gave and received.

The deception concerned more than a name. Her husband had told her the story of the man who bore it, and she had deeply empathized with the life that story described. She had enjoyed imagining her husband’s childhood as a quiet, serious boy who slipped away from the class clique at lunch, was left out of talk about crushes without minding, and later returned vividly to former classmates in memory. The portrait gave shape to the person she loved, but she now has to consider that the childhood she pictured belonged to someone else. The invented past had not merely concealed a fact; it had helped create her understanding of her husband.

Her memories of married life intensify rather than settle the contradiction. He had been gentle and generous, spoke little, kept a mild expression, and never raised his voice to her or the children. Rié contrasts him with her first husband, who became irritable after Yuto’s birth and overlooked the changes that eventually affected Ryo. She had never been happier than during the three years and nine months of her later marriage. Now those memories seem to spin like a top that falls still when his sudden death interrupts it. While the top kept turning, the contradictions in his story could remain unnoticed; after it stops, they come into view. Rié fears that the false identity might be lodged somewhere within her own life, like a face matching the barren name X.

Questions left by the deception

Rié wants to believe that her husband had a good reason for what he did, but cannot understand why he never told her. He had four and a half years from the time they met and, she feels, enough trust and opportunity to speak. Facing his photograph, she wishes she had a name by which she could call him. Her question—whether consummately performed, mendacious sincerity could be the ultimate deception—does not offer an answer. It registers the wound created when outward tenderness and concealed identity have occupied the same marriage.

Kido, too, cannot understand why X deceived Rié until the end. Their love appears to him more beautiful and pure than any he has known, which makes the unconfessed lie harder to reconcile, not easier. He wonders whether X planned to admit the truth had he not died suddenly, and whether the false past had helped Rié fall for him through sympathy for pain that she herself had endured. Even if the rest of X’s account was false, Kido asks whether he should have been honest when he opened his lips in the restaurant. The possibility that love could absolve the lie competes with the suspicion that the lie shaped the love from the beginning.

Kido’s final return to the words true love is brief and unresolved. The phrase does not close the argument; it exposes how uncertain its terms have become. The novel allows the love between Rié and her husband to remain beautiful without declaring the deception forgiven or inconsequential. Likewise, Kido’s promise of truth matters without undoing the role that lies have played in his way of relating to others. Sincerity here is neither guaranteed by a truthful biography nor disproved by a false one: it is tested in what people offer each other, what they withhold, and whether love can be renewed once the story supporting it has broken open.