X and Yuto’s father-son relationship

X and Yuto’s father-son relationship is a bond built through everyday care rather than biological descent, and after X’s death it becomes inseparable from Yuto’s struggle to keep his place in the family. X married Rié, moved into her family home, and became Yuto’s second father; his attention to the boy left a mark deep enough that Yuto later wished he could have been his real father. When X died, Yuto’s grief did not end with the funeral. It returned in ordinary moments: in the questions he still wanted to ask, in his attachment to the Taniguchi name, and in his fear that changing it would erase the father who had raised him.

A Father Made Through Care

X became Yuto’s stepfather when he married Rié and joined the household. Their family also included Hana, born to Rié and X. By the time X died in a mountain work accident, Yuto was twelve and Hana was three. The sudden loss ended a relationship whose importance lay not in legal or biological status but in the experience of being listened to, guided, and cared for.

Yuto’s later account of X’s parenting is specific: even when X scolded him, he sat him down, explained what he had done wrong, and listened to what he had to say. Yuto remembered this as a quality that distinguished X from his biological father, whom he called his old dad. He said X had been a better person and admitted that he wished his second dad had been his real one. Hana, he felt, was lucky to have X as her father from birth.

For a time, Yuto stopped using the phrase real dad. When he was eight, he had repeated Rié’s way of referring to his biological father as his old dad. Later, out of affection for X, or perhaps consideration for Rié, he seemed to avoid language that might imply X was not truly his father. His choice of words reflects the family’s complicated history, but it does not make his attachment to X any less genuine.

Grief and the Name Taniguchi

After X died, Yuto’s connection to him persisted through memory and through the family name he had acquired. Yuto had already lived under several surnames: Yonedas at birth, Takemoto after Rié’s first divorce, and Taniguchi when she remarried. As a middle-school student, he did not want to change back to Takemoto. His classmates, older students, and younger students all knew him as Taniguchi; having to correct them felt alienating, and the name Takemoto seemed to him to belong to his grandparents.

His objection, however, was not only about familiarity or the inconvenience of another change. Yuto asked Rié to let him remain Yuto Taniguchi because X’s family had turned away from him, and he feared that the household might forget him too. In Yuto’s understanding, keeping the surname was a way to honor his father and protect their bond from being recast as a temporary consequence of Rié’s second marriage.

The plea forces Rié to confront what the name means to her son. She had announced that she would return to her maiden name without explaining her decision, and Yuto’s apparent indifference had concealed distress. His request makes plain that what she regarded as a change in her own legal identity also threatened the continuity of his relationship with X.

What Yuto Believes He Would Lose

In their conversation, Yuto describes the consequences he imagines if he stops being Taniguchi. X would no longer feel like his father; he would become only the husband of Rié’s second marriage. Yuto himself would be left as the child of his old dad, while Hana would remain X’s child, with a different father from his. The fear is not that the past will literally change, but that the family’s names and categories will make the past harder to claim.

Yuto’s grief also remains active beneath his insistence. He tells Rié that he is no longer sad about X’s death and that his grandmother has been kind to him, then falters: each day he comes home with things he wants to ask his father, and he misses him. He breaks down crying as Rié strokes his back. The scene joins the practical question of a surname to an unfinished relationship: the name gives Yuto a way to speak of his father, while the daily questions reveal how much is still left unsaid.

When Rié asks what sort of person X was, Yuto answers that he was really nice. He remembers not simply being corrected, but being treated as someone whose explanation mattered. His account presents fatherhood as a practice of attention, patience, and care, not merely a place in a family tree. That remembered conduct is what gives his claim to X its emotional weight.

An Inherited Pattern of Care

Later, Yuto arrives at his own explanation for why X treated him so well: he thinks X did for him what he had wanted his own father to do for him. Rié confirms the insight while adding that X also cared about Yuto himself. The exchange holds two truths together. X’s parenting may have answered a deprivation in his own past, but it was not simply an act of substitution or repair; it became a relationship directed toward the particular child in front of him.

That distinction makes Yuto’s understanding more than an account of inherited hurt. He recognizes that X’s tenderness may have been shaped by what X lacked, yet he remembers receiving it as his own. The father-son bond therefore carries both a history that began before Yuto and a care that was made between them. After X’s death, Yuto’s wish to remain Taniguchi becomes a concrete expression of that double inheritance: he wants to keep the name of the man who cared for him, and to keep being able to call that man his father.