Japan

Japan appears as more than the setting for private lives: it is a state whose recognition can determine a person’s legal identity, even as national events register very differently from one community to another. Through Town S and Kido’s history as a naturalized citizen, the novel makes the country at once intimate and unevenly felt.

A national event and a local memory

In September 2011, news reached Town S that Rié’s husband had died. The year was nationally associated with the Great East Japan Earthquake, but in this town in central Miyazaki Prefecture, the death could occupy a more prominent place in residents’ memories. Some people in the community of about thirty thousand, including Rié’s mother, had never met anyone from the devastated Tohoku region. The contrast does not deny the earthquake’s scale; it shows how national history is experienced through the limits of local contact and the losses nearest at hand.

The contrast also establishes the novel’s way of locating Japan: not as a single, uniformly shared experience, but as a country composed of places with different horizons of attention. The death that matters to Town S is not nationally significant, yet it shapes the recollections of people there. Private bereavement and national disaster occupy the same year without carrying the same immediate weight for every community.

Kido’s citizenship and belonging

Kido’s relationship to Japan is personal as well as legal. He is third-generation Zainichi, and his family had used Japanese names; he began introducing himself as Kido around middle school, though his parents never explained why the family name had changed. His family ran an ordinary izakaya rather than a restaurant specializing in Korean food, and he grew up in Kanazawa, outside a Korean enclave. For much of his childhood he experienced little racism, but that relative ease did not resolve the questions surrounding his heritage.

In high school, Kido and his parents became Japanese citizens, relinquishing the Korean citizenship claim that predated the end of World War II. Kido had been indifferent to citizenship, was unable to read Korean, and regarded relatives visiting from South Korea as foreigners. His father’s advice before a school trip to Australia made the practical stakes plain: if something happened abroad, Kido could hope for protection from Japan, while South Korea had no sense of him and its government was unaware he existed.

The word sense remained with Kido for more than two decades. He suspected his father had meant reality, since South Korea had little immediate reality for him; yet the unusual wording gave him a paradoxical image of a nation that did not sense his existence while making him sense that nation for the first time. The recollection leaves open whether the word was simply mistaken or chosen deliberately. Citizenship here is not only a formal status: it is also a question of which country can recognize and protect someone, and which country has a felt presence in his life.

Legal recognition and mistaken identity

Kido’s work for Rié brings the state’s records into sharp focus. After serving as her divorce attorney in 2004, he had no contact with her until she wrote again years later under the surname Taniguchi. He initially failed to recognize her because her family name had changed twice since their earlier case. He was glad to think she had remarried, but learned that her husband, who had called himself Daisuké Taniguchi, had died and was not the man whose identity he claimed.

The impersonation was not merely a false name used in everyday life. Government officials had accepted the marriage and death notifications and updated the family register; the man had driven with a license, received medical care using health insurance, and made pension contributions. Public records consistently identified him as Daisuké Taniguchi, and his account of growing up in Gunma appeared to contain no discrepancy. Yet the actual man’s brother, Kyoichi Taniguchi, had seen a photograph and insisted that the deceased was someone else.

The case unsettles the apparent certainty of official recognition. Japan’s administrative systems had repeatedly confirmed the impostor’s identity, while the family’s recognition of the real Daisuké contradicted that record. For Kido, who could understand why someone might conceal a name or heritage, the puzzle was why anyone would take the identity of a real person. The discrepancy makes the national apparatus of documentation both powerful and vulnerable: it can grant a life legal coherence without making that life true.