Cancel impersonation marriage and correct Rie's household registration

Rié’s marriage to X is annulled through a court petition that corrects the family-register record and restores her maiden name. The legal remedy resolves the official confusion caused by X’s impersonation of Daisuké Taniguchi, but it also makes the marriage disappear from Rié’s record and changes Hana’s legal status. The correction is therefore more than clerical: it repairs one false account of identity by imposing consequential new classifications on the family.

The identity problem and the limits of official records

X had not merely used Daisuké Taniguchi’s name in conversation. Government officials had accepted his marriage notification and later his death notification, and his driving, medical care, and pension contributions had all been recorded under that identity. Public records consequently supported the claim that the deceased husband was Daisuké Taniguchi, even though the real Daisuké’s brother, Kyoichi Taniguchi, identified the man in a photograph as someone else. X’s identity appeared administratively consistent while being personally false.

This contradiction came to Rié’s attention after X’s death, when Kyoichi visited and she learned that the man she had married was not the real Daisuké. She and Kyoichi reported the matter to the police, but the detective focused on finding Daisuké and asked, “Huh? Then the one that died was who?” He had Rié submit a missing-person report for Daisuké without answering how she could establish her husband’s identity. Two weeks later, the police said that nobody matching Daisuké appeared on the missing-person list and that there was “no way to investigate at the present time.” With the investigation stalled, Rié turned to Kido, who had previously been her lawyer during the period when she lost Ryo.

The mismatch matters because the official record did not simply fail to catch X’s lie: it gave that lie legal force. The narrative later places the case beside the three-hundred-day problem, under which a child born within three hundred days of divorce is legally treated as the former husband’s child. Children whose births are not reported can be left without family registers and thus outside the state’s accounting, including when they die in a disaster. These cases differ from X’s, whose identity was registered and repeatedly accepted, but together they show how a person’s public existence can depend on what administrative records recognize.

Kido’s petition and the evidence required

When Kido met Rié in Miyazaki, his first proposal was to resolve the connection between her family register and the Taniguchi family’s. If X was not Daisuké, Kido reasoned, Rié had no reason to continue using the Taniguchi name. She agreed, though she still felt sentimental about the surname associated with her late husband and guilty about presenting herself under a name belonging to a stranger. Kido also reassured her that she could keep the life-insurance payment: X had been the contracting party and had paid the premiums, despite the documents listing Daisuké Taniguchi.

Because Rié and the supposed Daisuké shared a register whose legal residence was Rié’s family home, Kido petitioned the Miyazaki Family Court, which had jurisdiction over the registers of families residing in Town S. The petition sought two revisions. First, it asked the court to cancel the removal of Daisuké Taniguchi from the register on account of death. Restoring him to the records as alive would prevent the police from being left with a missing-person report for someone who was officially dead. Second, it asked the court to remove Daisuké’s name from Rié’s register and restore her maiden name, Takemoto. This would annul the marriage on the ground of error and erase the second marriage from her family record.

The court did not treat the matter as a routine correction. Given the complexity of the case, it required Rié to appear in person and requested DNA evidence that X was not Daisuké Taniguchi. Kido gathered samples from X’s personal effects, including hair from his clothes, nails from his clippers, and material from his electric razor and toothbrush, then took them back to Yokohama. The petition depended on connecting the intimate, practical traces of X’s life to a test capable of disproving the identity his official documents had established.

The ruling and its consequences for the family

Kido warned that the ruling could take anywhere from two months to a year; if the court rejected the petition, they would have to sue for a declaratory judgment that the marriage was invalid. Instead, about five months later, in the first week of August, both petitions were approved. The DNA test definitively showed that X was not Daisuké Taniguchi, and Rié’s second marriage was erased from the records. Her corrected legal history now showed that she had been married only once and was no longer a widow.

The correction also removed X’s name from Rié’s family register and reinstated her maiden name, Takemoto. It did not simply replace one husband’s name with another: the official account of the marriage was annulled altogether. Kido had prepared Rié for this result, but the consequence reaches beyond her personal status. Because the marriage was treated as invalid, Hana, Rié’s child with X, became legally illegitimate. The process that disentangled Rié from a false identity therefore altered the legal category attached to her daughter.

A corrected record and an unsettled past

The ruling corrects the public record, but Rié experiences its meaning as more than a successful legal procedure. She recognizes that the error had also been hers: she believed she had married a man named Daisuké Taniguchi, announced that belief to others, and notified the government of his death without knowing what the real Daisuké was doing or where he was. Once the court restored her legal history, the gap between what she had lived and what the register now said left her with a harrowing sadness and a weakened sense of whose life she was leading.

That response makes the outcome deliberately double-edged. The corrected register releases Rié from a marriage that, in law, had never been what she believed it to be. Yet the same correction cannot give her a name by which to call the man she knew as her husband, nor restore the shared life erased from the official account. The procedure settles the legal status of the marriage while leaving the human history that grew around X’s assumed identity unresolved. In the novel’s treatment of identity, the register is at once evidence, remedy, and a force that can redefine family relationships; what it corrects on paper does not automatically become simple or complete in memory.