2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami

The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami is both a catastrophe in the characters’ recent past and a pressure point in the novel’s inquiry into identity, loss, and official recognition. Its aftermath raises the possibility that a person absent from the family-register system could disappear not only from a family’s reach but from the state’s records altogether. The disaster also prompts Kido to reconsider the history carried by his own family and his wife’s, linking present-day vulnerability to older violence and silences.

Disaster and the missing from official records

The earthquake and tsunami enter Kido’s investigation after more than ten months without progress on the question of X’s identity. At his law firm, his colleague Nakakita tells him about people affected by the tsunami whose existence the government had not recorded because they lacked family registers. The example is not merely about a clerical oversight: without registration, a person’s birth may go unrecorded, and death in the disaster may likewise go uncounted.

Nakakita explains that the Civil Code’s three-hundred-day rule could leave children without a register. A child born within three hundred days of a divorce was legally treated as the former husband’s child; women who had divorced after domestic violence and then had a child with a new partner sometimes did not submit a birth notification. Even when such children met the conditions for Japanese citizenship, the state might not know they were alive. If the tsunami then took them, their deaths would also be absent from official tallies. Their passage into and out of life could be missing from the records that make a person administratively legible.

The conversation changes the direction of Kido’s thinking about X and the real Daisuké Taniguchi. Kido had imagined that Daisuké might be living under X’s identity after an exchange of family registers. Now he considers the reverse possibility: X may have been unregistered, leaving Daisuké to disappear from the system in his place. If Daisuké had taken the identity of someone absent from public records, even a murder might not be recognized as such by the state; a discovered body could be treated as unidentified. If the tsunami had swept away all physical evidence, the search would be harder still. The disaster makes an already difficult identity puzzle darker: a person might be missing without even leaving the kind of record that confirms he once existed.

A disaster recalled through family history

The earthquake also changes what Kido notices about the past. In its aftermath, news coverage repeatedly mentions the massacre of Koreans after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Kido, a third-generation Zainichi Korean who became a naturalized Japanese citizen in high school, had paid little attention to this history before. He learns that Yokohama was one of the main places where false rumors of a Korean riot originated, and he begins to reconsider a reassuring remark his father-in-law had made when Kido sought permission to marry Kaori: that after three generations, a Zainichi person was fully Japanese.

The history becomes personal in the form of Kaori’s family. Her grandfather, then a young child, would have experienced the Great Kanto Earthquake; her great-grandfather would have been an adult. Reports said that fire destroyed 80 percent of Yokohama’s urban area. Kido wonders what the two men might have been doing amid the violence that followed, but he has not asked his wife’s parents—or even Kaori—about it. Since the 2011 disaster, he and Kaori have discussed the possibility of a major earthquake striking the Tokyo region, yet the older catastrophe and its violence remain unspoken between them. The present disaster thus opens a question about inherited memory without resolving it.

Records, identity, and state recognition

The novel places the disaster beside the longer history of the Japanese family register. Nakakita traces the system to the late-sixth-century Ritsuryo bureaucracy, where it served principally policing and taxation. In the Edo period it expanded to include religious affiliation, partly to monitor registration with Buddhist temples and suppress Christianity, as well as information such as birth, marriage, adoption, address, occupation, and death. People outside the records, including vagrants, remained unaccounted for. After freedom of movement became recognized in the Meiji period, the older land-based system gave way to a modern register used for conscription and taxation; people seeking to avoid those obligations sometimes abandoned or falsified their records.

The conversation connects that history to the disaster’s unregistered victims. A register is not simply a neutral account of someone’s life: its presence or absence helps determine whether institutions can recognize that person. Nakakita observes that government identity management increasingly relies on residence certificates and that linking taxation and social security through the My Number system might make the family register redundant. Kido counters that such integration could make identity trading easier; Nakakita replies that biometrics would make the system difficult to evade. Their exchange leaves the underlying tension intact: stronger administrative identification may close gaps, but it also makes recognition and surveillance more comprehensive.

Disappearance and its human cost

The earthquake’s aftermath also frames the Taniguchi family’s uncertainty about Daisuké. Kyoichi tells Kido that the family heard nothing from his brother after the earthquake and finds that silence troubling: if Daisuké were alive, he thinks, he would have called, unless his life had become so bad that he could not face them. Kyoichi has shown little initiative in searching, wary of stumbling into trouble, but their mother has tearfully urged him to intensify the effort because she wants to see her younger son once more before she dies. The disaster makes the absence newly consequential without explaining what happened to Daisuké.

The possibility of a tsunami-related disappearance deepens Kido’s concern for Rié as well as for Daisuké. Rié is already struggling to hold on after her husband’s death, and Kido fears what it would mean for her if X had killed the man whose identity he assumed. Elsewhere in the investigation, legal revisions to Rié’s register remove the false marriage and restore her maiden name, while the revised records describe Daisuké as alive and unmarried. That administrative correction resolves particular legal problems, but it cannot answer whether the real Daisuké survived the disaster or where he went. The novel keeps the distinction sharp: the record can be amended, but a missing person’s fate remains unknown.

The disaster’s continuing presence

The earthquake and tsunami recede from direct discussion, but its consequences persist in the novel’s concern with who is counted, who can be found, and what families inherit without speaking. Yuto, meanwhile, insists that he wants to keep the Taniguchi surname because it is the name his friends know and because changing it again feels like doing wrong by the father he remembers. His attachment shows how an official or legal identity can also become a lived bond, even when the history behind it is complicated.

Rié sees the effects of loss in Yuto’s quietness and in the care he gives others. He proposes keeping goldfish because he saw his grandmother looking at the aquarium, and Rié is moved by the thoughtfulness of the gesture. At a field of flowers, she reflects that he has lost his brother, grandfather, and the man he believed to be his father, while continuing to tend the fish and watch over Hana. These are not scenes of the tsunami itself; rather, they show the family’s life among accumulated bereavements, as grief changes shape over time.

Literature gives Yuto another way to approach what he cannot easily say. Rié reads Akutagawa’s Asakusa Park after he recommends it and is struck by its story of a boy separated from his father. She wonders whether Yuto’s response to the story, which he read before she disclosed the truth about his father’s identity, reflected an intuition she had not recognized. Later, he explains a poem through an abandoned cicada shell on a cherry tree in Burial Mound Park: he imagined the shell hearing the voice of the cicada that had emerged after seven years underground. Rié connects the tree to her late husband and understands that writing has given Yuto a means of coping that she could not have prescribed. Against a disaster that can erase physical traces and leave people uncounted, his attention to a shell, a voice, and a remembered father becomes a small act of keeping experience present.