Yokohama District Court

The Yokohama District Court is a setting where legal proceedings meet the lives they classify and affect. The supplied scenes connect it both to a lawsuit over a worker’s death and to Kido’s petition concerning Rié’s marriage and family register; together, they show how court action can pursue an account of harm while also revising official identities and relationships.

The labor-death lawsuit

In the court’s capacious lobby, Kido speaks with two clients after the fifth oral argument in a lawsuit he has handled for almost two years. They are the parents of a man who died by suicide after working unconscionably long hours. The case has drawn growing public outcry, and the accused izakaya chain is beginning to show signs of moving toward a settlement.

The hearing is not an isolated courtroom exchange: Kido and the parents are due to report on it at a debriefing session attended by labor unions, and they use the meeting to confirm their strategy. The father makes clear that a verdict or settlement is not the only measure of the case. He wants to establish what actually happened and why his son died. Kido acknowledges that purpose, which gives the litigation an investigative and testimonial stake alongside its legal one.

A court petition about identity

In a separate matter, Kido turns to the Miyazaki Family Court, not the Yokohama District Court, to seek revisions to the family registers of Rié and the Taniguchis. The legal residence recorded for the relevant register is Rié’s family home in Town S, placing jurisdiction with the Miyazaki court. Kido’s proposed revisions would first cancel the record that “Daisuké Taniguchi” had been removed from the register due to death, so that the records would show him alive and the police would no longer be left pursuing a missing person who was officially dead.

The second proposed revision would remove “Daisuké Taniguchi” from Rié’s register and restore her maiden name, Takemoto. In legal terms, the changes would annul the marriage on the basis of error and erase Rié’s second marriage from her family register. That remedy carries a further consequence: Hana, Rié’s child with X, would become legally illegitimate. Kido first proposes resolving the link between Rié’s and the Taniguchi family registers; Rié agrees, in part because continuing to use the Taniguchi name has come to feel like introducing herself under the name of a stranger.

Procedure, evidence, and recognition

The register case cannot be completed by paperwork alone. Because of its complexity, the Miyazaki court asks Rié to appear in person and requests a DNA test to establish that X was not Daisuké Taniguchi. Kido gathers possible samples from X’s personal effects: hair from his clothes, nail clippings from his clippers, an electric razor, and a toothbrush. The objects become evidence through which the court can test the identity on which the marriage record rests.

That request stands in contrast to Rié’s earlier attempt to obtain answers from the police. After she and Kyoichi report the circumstances of X’s death, the detective focuses on filing a missing-person report for Daisuké and does not explain how Rié might identify her late husband. Two weeks later, the station says it has found no missing person matching Daisuké Taniguchi and that there is no way to investigate at that time. Kido’s court petition offers a procedural route where the police response has left Rié without one, though that route itself requires proof, personal attendance, and changes with significant consequences for her and Hana.

Legal records and the limits of official existence

The novel also sets the register proceedings against the three-hundred-day problem under the Civil Code. A child born within three hundred days of a divorce is legally presumed to be the former husband’s child. In the cases discussed, women who have divorced after domestic violence and then had a child with a new partner may refrain from registering the birth, leaving the child without a family register. Although such children may meet the conditions for Japanese citizenship, the state may not recognize that they are alive, and their deaths in a disaster may go uncounted.

These distinct cases give official records unusual narrative weight. A register can mark someone as dead when the person is missing, assign a child a legal parent, or leave a person outside the state’s account of who has lived and died. The Yokohama courtroom’s labor case asks what happened to a real person behind a public legal dispute; Kido’s petition elsewhere seeks to make the records correspond to a concealed identity, even as correcting them produces a new legal vulnerability for Hana.