X impersonated Daisuké Taniguchi and married Rié

X’s life as Daisuké Taniguchi begins as an act of impersonation and becomes a real marriage, a household, and a bond with Rié and her children. The decisive contradiction is that the man who died as Rié’s husband was not the actual Daisuké: he had taken the name of a real person and lived under it so completely that public records confirmed the false identity. His family life was genuine in its attachments, but its legal foundation was borrowed.

Meeting and the Name

When X approaches Rié at her family’s stationery shop, he does not begin by claiming intimacy. He asks whether she will be his friend. Rié agrees, though she is bewildered by the directness of the request and uncertain what he means by friendship. The encounter sets the terms of their relationship: closeness is not assumed but cautiously asked for, and the identity he offers her is already false.

X introduces himself as Daisuké Taniguchi and gives Rié a business card listing Ito Lumber, a mobile number, and an email address. Rié, without a card of her own, writes her name on a yellow sticky note by the cash register. The exchange is ordinary in form—a name, contact details, a possible dinner invitation—but the name is not his. A small piece of paper and a business card establish the first version of a shared life, one whose simplicity conceals a profound deception.

After that meeting, X comes by about once every ten days. As their conversations lengthen, Rié begins leaving the shop in her mother’s care so that she can have tea and go on other outings with him. He says he works in forestry on a nearby mountain; logging sites usually close before four, so he hurries to see her after work. His visits give their relationship a steady rhythm, and his explanation of his working life makes him legible to Rié without disclosing the truth of his name.

A Past Shared in Confidence

Rié initially avoids asking about X’s past because she senses his discomfort. Eventually, however, she thinks she detects hints that he wants to be asked. On a day when heavy rain keeps him from work, they have lunch at a neighborhood eel restaurant. Over hot tea after the meal, he begins to tell her about his family and the events that led him to leave it behind.

X describes the crisis surrounding his father’s liver transplant. He wavered over consenting to the procedure, but his father’s cancer progressed faster than expected; by the time X had struggled with the decision, it was too late. His father died with an expression Rié later understands as bitter and angry, and neither X’s mother nor his brother offered comfort over his ultimately futile resolution. X says he felt relief as well as the desire to save his father, and that after the death he believed something in him had been broken beyond repair. He cut contact with his family, left town, and told Rié he had no intention of seeing them again or speaking further about them.

Rié listens without interrupting. In response, she entrusts him with losses of her own: the death of her son from illness, the disagreement over his medical treatment that caused her divorce, and her return home after her father’s death. When she finishes, X looks at her without moving, lowers his head, and nods three times. After the restaurant has grown quieter and a server clears their lacquered eel boxes, he reaches across the table and gently shelters the back of Rié’s hand with his blistered palm. Rié finds its warmth comforting. The gesture is not a resolution of either person’s past; it is the moment their disclosures become a relationship.

The scene also shows the particular trust on which X’s new life depends. Rié gives him a secret of comparable emotional weight after hearing his account, but the exchange is not equal in what it reveals: she has told him about her losses, while the most basic fact about his own identity remains hidden. What passes between them is emotionally sincere even as the name under which he approaches her is not.

Marriage, Work, and Family

X is thirty-five when he arrives in Town S seeking a career in forestry despite having no experience in the industry. He finds work at Ito Lumber and, over four years, earns the admiration of the company president through his diligence. His arrival in town is followed within a year by his marriage to Rié, an unusually rapid turn that surprises local residents. Because Rié is considered sensible and trustworthy, they assume she must have examined his character carefully and concluded he posed no danger. Their confidence in her judgment brings local curiosity about his past to a halt.

After the marriage, X moves into Rié’s family home. He and Rié have a daughter, Hana; by the time of his death, Rié’s son Yuto is twelve and Hana is three. In the household he is not merely an outsider presenting himself under another man’s name: he occupies the place of husband and father through shared domestic life. That family life gives the impersonation human consequences beyond the falsified name itself.

X’s work is physically demanding and dangerous, and he and Rié discuss the possibility that he might suffer an accident. He insists that, even if he dies, Rié must not contact his family in Gunma or associate with them in any way. His prohibition preserves the separation he had established after leaving home, but it also makes the practical aftermath of his death harder for Rié. His hidden past remains sealed by a request that she continues to respect even when he is no longer there to explain it.

Death and Exposure

X is killed at thirty-nine when a cryptomeria tree he has felled crushes him. Rié rushes to the hospital after hearing the news, but he is already dead. The suddenness of the accident ends his life without resolving his estrangement from his family or the questions he had kept from his wife. Rié later regrets not pressing him to reconcile; she feels his death has left too much unfinished.

Rié follows X’s instruction not to contact his family for the first year after his death. Then, after consulting her mother and friends, she writes to them, chiefly to ask what should happen to his grave: she still has nowhere to entomb his ashes. The letter brings the man who had been kept outside their life into the aftermath of the household X created with Rié.

The revelation that follows overturns the apparent identity of the deceased. Rié’s husband, known to her as Daisuké Taniguchi, was an impostor; the real Daisuké Taniguchi existed and could be identified in census information and family-register records. X had not merely used a convenient invented name. His marriage and death notifications were accepted by government officials, and the resulting official record identified him as the real Daisuké. He had driven under the name with a license, received medical care with a health-insurance card, and made his pension contributions on time. His public life had accumulated the ordinary documentary proofs of identity.

Those records do not settle the question of who died. The real Daisuké’s brother, Kyoichi Taniguchi, visits Rié a year after the death and swears, upon seeing a photograph of her husband, that the man in it is not his brother. X’s account of growing up in Gunma appears consistent, yet his face contradicts the family’s recognition. The gap between legal identity and bodily recognition turns a private deception into a mystery requiring investigation.

Significance of the Borrowed Life

X’s impersonation succeeds because it is sustained across different kinds of evidence. A name spoken to Rié, a company card, a marriage, government records, work, medical care, and pension contributions all reinforce the same public identity. The falsehood is therefore not a single false introduction that can simply be corrected; it has become the framework within which X’s family life was formally registered and socially understood.

At the same time, the novel distinguishes the falsity of X’s name from the reality of the ties formed under it. His visits, his confidence in the eel restaurant, his marriage to Rié, and his place in a household with Yuto and Hana are not erased by the exposure. Instead, the discovery makes those attachments harder to classify: the husband and father Rié knew was real to her, while the legal person he claimed to be belonged to someone else. His death fixes the contradiction in place. X can no longer explain why he chose this identity, and the family he made must confront both the life they shared and the records that insist another man lived it.