Family-register exchange

Family-register exchange is the novel’s mechanism for changing a person’s legal identity, but its consequences extend well beyond paperwork: a new register can alter the life someone recognizes as their own. Daisuké Taniguchi describes the process as a way of becoming someone different, not by recovering another person’s past, but by covering over one’s own until it is nearly unrecognizable. Through his account and Makoto Hara’s repeated exchanges, the practice emerges as both a desperate escape and an uncertain chance to begin again.

The Exchange as Transformation

Daisuké tells Kido that the change is not immediate or merely legal. After a year has passed, he says, a person who has exchanged registers actually becomes different. When Kido calls him Daisuké Taniguchi, he responds as though the name belongs to somebody else. The shift has altered not only his public identity but also his attachment to his former family and past. He once hated the Taniguchis; now, seeing Kyoichi Taniguchi on Facebook, he regards him simply as the comic owner of a provincial inn. The former relationship has lost its old emotional force along with its place in Daisuké’s present life.

His explanation rejects the idea that forgetting can be achieved by willpower alone. Cutting off relationships and moving elsewhere may allow memories to fade, but, he insists, trying to erase a hated past will not work. It has to be overwritten: another person’s life is laid over it until the original becomes difficult to recognize. The metaphor makes the exchange less like a clean substitution than an accumulation of stories, with a new identity gradually obscuring the old one.

Motives and Choices

For Daisuké, the central motive was severing his connection to his family. The register bearing the name Daisuké Taniguchi was especially desirable because it had a clean past and no criminal record. Its value also made it the target of repeated exchanges: one man kept trading for supposedly better registers in the hope of eventually obtaining it, like the protagonist of the folktale “Straw Millionaire.” Daisuké says he would have exchanged with almost anyone to leave his family behind, but he would not accept a criminal record or a partner who might scheme to claim the Taniguchi estate. The search for a new life was therefore shaped by practical dangers as well as emotional urgency.

Daisuké’s exchange with Hara followed a different logic. He describes Hara as having an intense past and says that Sonézaki seemed almost the only available partner. Hara’s difficulty was not that Sonézaki was the child of a gangster; it was that, after meeting him in person, Hara simply disliked him. Even so, Hara listened closely to Daisuké’s account and said he wanted to make the most of the life that remained to him. Daisuké recalls that he met Hara only twice, but liked him and trusted the purity he saw in his eyes. Since Daisuké felt he was giving his life away, he wanted to give it to someone who seemed genuinely intent on changing course.

Repeated Exchanges and Their Risks

Hara had already exchanged registers once before he took on Daisuké’s identity. As Daisuké explains it, Hara first became Yoshihiko Sonézaki, then exchanged with him. Multiple exchanges were not unusual in that world; Daisuké considers a person who had made only one exchange, as he had, to be in the minority. The sequence shows that the practice could operate as a chain rather than a single swap, each new identity offering another attempted break with what came before.

Kido’s realization about Hara’s earlier history also connects these exchanges to the exploitation of people with little power to resist. He understands that the original Sonézaki must have been the person who imposed Hara’s register on the defenseless Tashiro. The apparent transaction between partners thus sits beside coercion and the movement of identities through vulnerable people. A register could offer escape to one person while being forced onto another; the possibility of renewal did not make the system benign.

Memory, Continuity, and the Novel’s Wider Pattern

Daisuké’s account unsettles Kido’s earlier assumption that taking on another identity necessarily means living out the trauma of the person whose story is being adopted. Kido recognizes that the man before him seems radically different from the Daisuké whom Misuzu described, even though he has no doubt that this is her former lover and Kyoichi’s missing brother. The gap between a person’s remembered character and present self makes the exchange difficult to reduce to a simple question of whether someone is still the same person.

Later, as Kido recalls tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the thought of Hara expands into a wider reflection on the many people whose registers Omiura exchanged. Like the figures in the myths, they may have been driven to change by grief, desperation, or pressure from others. Some may have found love and happiness; others may have fallen further from grace. The comparison does not make each transformation equivalent, but it places identity exchange within a recurring pattern in which change can be imposed, chosen, hopeful, or destructive.

The practice therefore holds two truths together. A new register can give someone a way to leave a hated past and build attachments that feel real in the present; it can also carry forward the violence and vulnerability that made escape necessary. Daisuké’s account presents identity not as an untouched essence preserved beneath a false name, but as something reshaped by relationships, distance, and the life lived under a new one. Yet Hara’s successive exchanges and Tashiro’s exposure to a register imposed on him keep that possibility morally unresolved: transformation may open a future, but it cannot guarantee freedom or happiness.