Ikkō Onsen

Ikaho Onsen, a hot-spring town in Gunma Prefecture, is the home of the Taniguchi family’s inn and the starting point of a story about inheritance, unequal parental affection, and a missing man’s identity. The town’s significance extends beyond its role as a place: Daisuké’s account of the family business supplies the biographical detail that helps Kido connect an apparent imposture to the real Daisuké Taniguchi.

Setting and the Taniguchi Inn

The Taniguchi family owns an inn in Ikaho Onsen. Daisuké is the younger of two sons, with an older brother a year ahead of him. Because the elder son is expected to inherit the inn, the family’s history there is shaped by the customary priority given to the firstborn rather than by the brothers’ contrasting conduct or capacity.

The older brother is described as a “dawdling master.” Although not bad at heart, he takes his future inheritance for granted, neglects his studies, and becomes a troublesome middle-schooler, distressing his parents. He later enters a private university in Tokyo, studies in America for two years, and returns to Japan, but instead of coming back to the family inn he goes straight to the capital and opens a restaurant with friends. Ikaho Onsen thus remains the family’s expected destination for him even as his choices take him elsewhere.

The Succession Dispute

Daisuké’s parents love their elder son and spend years trying to persuade him to return. When those efforts fail, they reluctantly turn to their second son. Less adventurous than his brother, Daisuké graduates from the economics department of a public university in the countryside and joins his father’s company. He works diligently, hoping to cheer his disappointed parents and gradually establish that he can carry on their legacy.

That prospect changes when his brother returns burdened by debt after his restaurant fails. Their father agrees to pay the debt only if the older son takes over the inn; their mother supports the decision. The parents propose a division of titles: the brother will eventually become “managing director,” while Daisuké will be “vice president.” The arrangement restores the elder son to the succession without erasing Daisuké’s practical responsibility. He understands that he will still have to carry the business, whatever the titles say.

For Daisuké, the dispute is not simply about who runs the inn. He has long struggled to understand why his parents love his brother so much more simply because he is the eldest male. He loves his brother, but recognizes that the feeling is not fully returned. The succession plan therefore threatens to make an already unequal relationship sour further: Ikaho Onsen is both the family home Daisuké is prepared to serve and the setting for the favoritism he cannot reconcile.

A Story That Travels

Daisuké tells Rié about his past only after she has respectfully avoided pressing him, sensing his discomfort. She begins to notice what seem like hints that he wants her to ask, and eventually does so. On a day when heavy rain keeps him from work, they have lunch at a neighborhood eel restaurant; over hot tea afterward, he hesitates, then begins his account. Ikaho Onsen enters the novel through this act of narration, as remembered family history shared between husband and wife.

Later, the town’s distinctive family connection becomes a clue in Kido’s investigation. After speaking with the actual Kyoichi Taniguchi at the Cerulean Hotel in Shibuya, Kido learns that the man Rié married truly was not Daisuké Taniguchi. Kyoichi is identified as the fourth-generation inheritor of the inn in Ikaho Onsen. When Kido later tells Omiura that a man had used Daisuké’s name, died under it, and left the real Taniguchi missing, Omiura recognizes the reference as the second son from Ikaho Onsen. The place links the family story Kido has heard to the identity exchange he is trying to understand.

Memory, Identity, and Place

Ikaho Onsen’s role in the story depends on the difference between a true past and a past that can be borrowed. Rié’s son Yuto recalls the story his father told him about a home in Ikaho Onsen, a fight with family, and coming away after running off. Rié tells him that this was not her husband’s past: it belonged to Daisuké Taniguchi. The town is therefore not merely a setting in a family anecdote; it is evidence embedded in a false personal history, one that can sound intimate and coherent while belonging to someone else.

The revelation also makes the town a point of recognition across separate conversations. Daisuké’s account gives the inn, the elder brother, and the succession conflict their personal meaning; Kyoichi’s connection to the inn confirms the real family background; and Omiura’s recognition of “the second son from Ikaho Onsen” shows that the location can identify the missing man even when his name has been appropriated. Its narrative force lies in that double function: Ikaho Onsen anchors a real family history and exposes the borrowed story that had passed as another man’s life.