Family-register records

Family-register records are more than proof of identity in the novel: they are the administrative framework through which a person’s family ties, public existence, and legal status can be established, manipulated, or erased. The records make X legible to government institutions as Daisuké Taniguchi, yet also expose the gap between a documented identity and the person living under it. Their power is most unsettling at its limits: people missing from the register can be absent not only from official life but, in certain circumstances, from the state’s accounting of life and death.

What the Records Establish

The family register holds details that connect a person to a recognized family and a legible civic identity. In the case of X, public records show “Daisuké Taniguchi” as married to Rié and later recorded as dead. Officials processed the marriage and death notifications; he used a driving license and health-insurance card, and made pension contributions. His account of growing up in Gunma also appeared consistent with the register. Yet Kyoichi Taniguchi, the real Daisuké’s brother, identified the man in a photograph as someone else. The documents verified a life under Daisuké’s name without resolving who had lived it.

That discrepancy makes the register both evidence and a source of uncertainty. Kido initially struggles to understand how X could have been treated as a real person by public authorities while being an impostor in the eyes of Daisuké’s family. The records did not merely preserve a false name used in conversation: they supported a legally recognized marriage, routine dealings with institutions, and an official death. Their completeness gave the assumed identity an appearance of continuity, even as the family’s recognition of the man contradicted it.

Exchange, Inheritance, and the Search for Daisuké

The records also bear the consequences of decisions made within families. Daisuké’s parents had once decided to entrust their inn to him after his elder brother declined to return. When the brother later came home burdened by debt, their father agreed to pay it only if he took over the inn, promising him the title of managing director and Daisuké that of vice president. Daisuké understood that he would still carry much of the practical responsibility. His parents’ preference for the eldest son left him struggling with a family order in which affection and inheritance seemed tied to birth order.

When their father developed advanced liver cancer, the register’s family relationships became consequential in another way: a living relative was needed as a potential liver donor. The brother was disqualified because of a fatty liver, while Daisuké’s was healthy. Daisuké understood the family’s unspoken hopes and the urgency of the situation, but ultimately chose to donate of his own accord. His father thanked him, the only time he would do so, and his brother promised him the whole inheritance. The family’s promises and obligations belong to lived relationships; the register’s capacity to record kinship cannot itself settle how those ties are honored.

Later, Kido’s search follows the documents backward. An attachment to Daisuké’s register supplied his former address: a cheap apartment in Osaka. Kyoichi went there and spoke with the building company’s president, who recognized the real Daisuké’s photograph but not X’s. That report suggested that Daisuké had remained himself until he lived in the apartment, and that he and X encountered one another afterward. The register helped direct the investigation, but its trail ended at the point where identity may have been taken or exchanged.

The Possibility of Missing Records

The novel sets identity exchange against the problem of people who have no family register at all. Kido hears from Nakakita about children born within three hundred days of a divorce, whom the Civil Code legally treats as children of the former husband. Some women in difficult circumstances have avoided filing birth notifications, leaving their children outside the register. In the aftermath of the tsunami, people without registration could escape the government’s count: even when they met the conditions for Japanese citizenship, official systems did not know they were alive, and could not properly record their deaths. The same administrative absence that obscures a person’s birth can also obscure their disappearance.

The register’s history broadens this concern beyond the recent crisis. Its origins lie in the late-sixth-century Ritsuryo system, where it served policing and tax collection. In the Edo period, records of religious affiliation helped authorities monitor whether people were registered with Buddhist temples, while identity records expanded to include information such as birth, marriage, adoption, address, work, and death. People who were not captured by the system, including vagrants, remained outside its account. The modern register, introduced after freedom of movement was recognized in the Meiji period, was used for conscription and taxation; people seeking to avoid those obligations sometimes abandoned or falsified their records.

Kido and Nakakita discuss the possibility that changing systems of identity management could make the register redundant, as residence certificates and the My Number system connect records of taxation and social security. But that prospect does not remove the danger of exchange; it may make the management of identity easier to consolidate. The records are not simply an old-fashioned archive. They are part of a changing administrative infrastructure that determines which identities can be verified and which can be traded.

Reconstructing the Exchanges

A 2007 case gives Kido a possible model for how registers could be exchanged. A fifty-five-year-old man had pretended to be a sixty-seven-year-old, but the deception involved more than using another name: the two men had mutually traded family registers. One sought to collect a pension under the other’s identity; the other wanted to appear younger and unmarried to his fiancée. A broker arranged the exchange and had reportedly organized others for a fee. Because 2007 was also the year Daisuké left his Osaka apartment and X appeared in Town S, Kido wonders whether the same kind of intermediary connected the men.

Kido’s reconstruction remains a hypothesis, revised as new testimony emerges. He comes to suspect that Makoto Hara first used the register of Yoshihiko Sonézaki, then crossed paths with Daisuké and became Daisuké Taniguchi, while the real Daisuké assumed the name Sonézaki. Later, evidence concerning Shozo Tashiro complicates that sequence: Tashiro may have received Hara’s unwanted identity from a different man, rather than trading directly with Hara. Kido therefore considers whether the other man had originally been Sonézaki and whether Hara first took that identity before exchanging it for Daisuké’s. The records preserve traces of these identities, but cannot by themselves establish who consented, who acted as intermediary, or who was living under each name at every point.

Legal Revision and Human Consequences

The register is not only a clue to the past; its entries also determine the legal consequences for Rié and her children. Because the family register listing Rié and “Daisuké Taniguchi” gave their residence as Rié’s family home, Kido petitioned the Miyazaki Family Court for two revisions. First, he sought to cancel the removal of “Daisuké Taniguchi” from the register on account of death, restoring the official record to show him as alive and addressing the contradiction of a person who was legally dead but still the subject of a missing-person report. Second, he sought to remove “Daisuké Taniguchi” from Rié’s register and restore her maiden name, Takemoto. Annulment of the marriage on grounds of error would erase the second marriage from her record, but would also make Hana legally illegitimate. The court requested Rié’s presence and DNA evidence that X was not Daisuké; Kido gathered hair, nail clippings, and other personal effects for testing.

The legal correction could not determine what name Yuto should keep. When Rié told him she intended to return to Takemoto, he admitted that he wanted to remain Taniguchi. He had already lived under the Yoneda and Takemoto names before becoming Taniguchi, and now his classmates knew him by the latter. To him, another change meant having to correct people continually and being made to carry a name he associated with his grandparents rather than his own daily life. He also feared that changing names would compound the family’s neglect of his father: the ashes remained in an urn, and he worried that his father’s family had already turned away from him and that they might forget him too.

Yuto’s choice reveals what an administrative name cannot contain. He understands his father’s kindness as something the man had wanted from his own father, but also as a genuine expression of care for Yuto. A register can preserve or revise the official arrangement of a family; it cannot erase the lived relationship that a child remembers. Across the novel, the records expose a recurring divide between public identity and personal recognition: they can make an assumed life appear fully documented, yet fail to include the unregistered, and their correction can alter legal kinship without undoing memory or attachment.