Christmas

Christmas is a recurring marker in Kido’s story, joining the hurried passage of a year to an investigation that had begun around the same season. Its domestic ritual brings his solitude into view, while the days immediately before the holiday redirect his attention toward the art of people awaiting execution and back toward the mystery of X.

The Tree and the Passing Year

Kido finally decorates the Christmas tree before bed, having put off the task. He plays a CD of duets by Masabumi Kikuchi and Masahiko Togashi and opens the cardboard box where the lights and silver and gold ornaments have remained packed exactly as they were a year earlier. Seeing the components of the artificial tree recalls that Rié had contacted him about X around the same time. The objects have not changed, but the year has gone by so quickly that he is astonished; the feeling, he notes, returns almost monthly.

As he assembles the tree, Kido also recalls sitting alone in the room after putting Sota to bed, drinking vodka and pondering the intense joy he had felt. The preparation itself takes only fifteen minutes. He places the finished tree beside the glass door to the veranda, wraps it in LEDs, and hangs stars and baubles on its branches. With the room lights dimmed, the glass reflects both the tree and Kido standing alone behind it: a seasonal domestic scene made inseparable from his isolation.

Music, Memory, and Stillness

Kido considers having drinks, as he had on the earlier night, but Masabumi Kikuchi’s solo-piano version of “All the Things You Are” changes his attention. The music seems to loosen the sense of time: each note falls and spreads into overlapping ripples through the quiet room. Kido becomes absorbed not only in the sound but in the anticipation of each note and its lingering resonance, holding his breath as he watches the lights repeat their pattern. The scene pauses the ordinary rush of time that the packed decorations had first made so palpable.

The Days Before Christmas

Two weeks later, Kido’s fading interest in his investigation is revived by an unexpected turn that brings him upon X’s true identity. Three days before Christmas, after finishing work at the Tokyo District Court, he goes to Shibuya to see an exhibition of art made by death-row convicts. He learned of it through Sugino, a lawyer friend and committed opponent of capital punishment in Japan.

Kido opposes capital punishment himself, but has not taken part in the abolition movement and has no experience defending defendants facing a death sentence. His immediate reason for attending is his new interest in convict art, prompted by his encounter with Omiura and the peculiar postcards Omiura sent from prison. Kido wonders what Omiura’s drawings might have become had the con man faced execution for a murder he had committed: art made in the present under the pressure of both a violent past and a state-imposed death awaiting in the future. That question carries Kido from the private, cyclical time of the Christmas tree into the exhibition’s confrontation with mortality.

Snow falls as he walks from Shibuya Station to the small gallery beside the Tokyu Department Store. Although he carries an umbrella, the front of his jacket is whitened by the snow; a weather forecast has warned that it may accumulate even in central Tokyo. He walks briskly, the movement warming his numbed cheeks. The exhibition visit begins a renewed phase of the investigation: after nearly persuading himself to abandon it, Kido is drawn back in and becomes absorbed once more by the search for X.