Tokyo is both a working city and a pressure point in Kido’s investigation: its courts and hotel lounges provide the ordinary venues for a legal inquiry, while its streets, public spaces, and imagined future disasters draw his private identity into contact with Japan’s unresolved history of violence against Koreans. The city’s importance lies less in a single landmark than in the way its everyday geography makes Kido’s questions about names, belonging, and safety impossible to keep abstract.

Legal Investigation and Meeting Places

After completing a hearing at the Tokyo District Court, Kido went to the Cerulean Hotel in Shibuya to speak with Kyoichi Taniguchi, the brother of the man who had married Rié and died under Daisuké Taniguchi’s name. Kido had already found the identity problem difficult to explain: official records seemed to confirm the deceased as Daisuké, yet Kyoichi had identified the man in a photograph as someone else. Kido was on his way home from this meeting, having decided first to help with inheritance-related matters. Tokyo thus enters the story as the site where a puzzling question of personal identity becomes a lawyer’s concrete task.

The meeting’s surroundings give the investigation a distinctly urban social texture. Kyoichi, a fourth-generation inn inheritor from Ikaho Onsen, had come to Tokyo for business and described plans to visit the Roppongi nightclub district to meet an old friend. His flashy appearance and suggestive manner struck Kido as an oddly intimate performance for a first meeting with a lawyer. That theatrical self-presentation contrasted with the substance of Kyoichi’s account, which was businesslike and steady; Kido came away with the impression that he was telling the truth. The city accommodates both the performance and the evidence, but the legal question turns on the latter.

Arakicho and the Search for Misuzu Goto

Toward the end of January 2013, after his work had eased, Kido arranged to meet Misuzu Goto, identified as Daisuké’s former lover. The telephone number Kyoichi had provided no longer worked. Learning that Misuzu was a web designer, Kido located her Facebook page and sent a message explaining the case. She answered quickly, apparently worried and confused about Daisuké, and asked him to come to a friend’s bar where she worked nights on the side. Kido questioned whether a bar would be suitable for a serious conversation, but accepted her choice, suspecting she was wary of meeting him alone.

The bar was in Arakicho, in Shinjuku, a short walk from Yotsuya-Sanchome Station. Kido had not visited the district before and took a brief walk through its closely connected alleys, lined with bars and restaurants. The morning’s cold and light snowfall had cleared by the afternoon. In this compact urban setting, an online lead becomes an in-person encounter: Tokyo’s nightlife is not merely background but the practical route by which Kido follows the trail from a failed phone number to someone who may clarify Daisuké’s past.

Earthquake Memory, Xenophobia, and Belonging

Tokyo also becomes the imagined scene of a future disaster in Kido’s reflections on the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake and the massacre of Koreans that followed it. Watching a television discussion of xenophobia, he considers that the earthquake’s ninetieth anniversary had passed the previous year and that the centenary was only a decade away. A major earthquake in the Nankai Trough and another centered in the Tokyo region are treated as near certainties, though their timing is unknown. In his neighborhood, residents worry about buildings collapsing and tsunami damage. Kido thinks he might survive a tsunami if he were at home on the ninth floor, but not necessarily if he were at the waterfront in Yamashita Park playing with Sota.

The imagined danger turns from natural disaster to human violence. Kido wonders whether, after another catastrophe, frightened people might again take up the cry “Death to Koreans!” and target him and his family. His work as a lawyer, his role as a father, his love of music, and his sense of being a good person would offer no protection; those traits might even become reasons for resentment. The fear links a possible future in the city to a documented past, making public safety inseparable from the question of who is accepted as belonging.

Kido knows the historical record is not a matter of vague symbolism. The prosecutions he has consulted document fifty-three cases in which Koreans were murdered, while the Ministry of Justice at the time counted 233 deaths. Estimates of the actual toll vary, and some accounts place it several times higher; Chinese people were also killed. The scale and brutality of the murders unsettle him physically and emotionally. The historical account does not remain at a distance: Kido imagines the violated dead and feels their cold as though it touched his own skin.

Family Outing and the City’s Ordinary Time

Against these anxious reflections, Tokyo also holds a routine family memory. Three days before Kido returned to see Rié, he and his family travelled to the Tokyo Skytree because Sota had wanted to visit. They arrived at eleven in the morning after taking the Toyoko and Hanzomon lines. The tower had opened two years earlier, and they expected the crowds to have thinned; instead, on a spring weekend, they were told to wait two hours just to receive a number before joining the ticket line. Outside the windows was a clear, bright-blue sky.

The episode is remembered as an ordinary weekend, not a defining crisis, and that contrast matters. Tokyo’s immense crowds and transit network frame family life in its commonplace form, while Kido’s later thoughts expose the historical vulnerability that can suddenly inhabit the same city. The Skytree outing does not resolve his concerns; it shows how such concerns coexist with plans made for a child, train rides, queues, and an expansive view under a clear sky.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, Tokyo is a landscape of encounters and exposure. The hotel lounge and the bar in Arakicho bring Kido into contact with people whose testimony bears on a legal mystery. The district’s routes and venues make investigation possible, but the city’s modern infrastructure cannot settle the question of who a person is when public records and physical recognition disagree. Nor can the ordinary protections of home, profession, or family guarantee safety in Kido’s imagined future of disaster and xenophobic violence.

The city’s narrative force comes from this double register. It is where Kido conducts practical work and shares a family outing, yet also where the past’s anti-Korean violence presses into his understanding of his own naturalized citizenship and ancestry. Tokyo is not presented as a simple symbol of danger or belonging: its crowded attractions and familiar routines continue alongside historical memory and the fear of its recurrence. That coexistence makes the city the setting in which Kido’s private life and public history repeatedly meet.