Kido

Kido’s role in Rié’s case is both practical and searching: when the police leave her without answers, he uses the family court to untangle the false identity attached to her marriage, then pursues the unresolved question of who X was. His work joins legal procedure to a personal struggle with identity, official recognition, and the stories people construct from fragmentary evidence.

Identity and Approach

Kido is a lawyer whose earlier work for Rié included supporting her during divorce mediation after the death of her son, Ryo. She remembers him as a calm, kind presence and, during the years when she was grieving in Yokohama, her only reliable support. When she later faces the mystery of her husband’s identity, she approaches him not only because he is a lawyer but because she trusts that history.

He brings a measured manner to difficult cases, but his composure does not make him detached. In Miyazaki, Rié notices a trace of loneliness in his expression that he seems not to recognize himself. That detail sits alongside his professional attentiveness: he listens to her account, considers the implications of the name X used, and makes the legal consequences intelligible rather than treating them as paperwork alone.

Rié’s Case and the Family Register

Rié first reports the circumstances surrounding her husband’s death to the police. The detective responds with confusion, asks who had actually died, and takes no investigative step beyond having Kyoichi file a missing-person report for Daisuké Taniguchi. When Rié asks how she can learn the identity of her late husband, the detective puts that question aside. Two weeks later, the station tells her that no one matching Daisuké’s name appears on the missing-person list and that there is no way to investigate at that time.

With the police offering no path forward, Rié calls Kido. He proposes beginning with the connection between her family register and the Taniguchi family’s records. If X was not Daisuké Taniguchi, Kido reasons, Rié has no reason to continue using the Taniguchi name. She agrees, though she still feels sentimental about the name because it belonged to the husband she mourns; after meeting Kyoichi, however, she has also felt uneasy introducing herself by a name that may belong to a stranger.

Kido also addresses the life insurance X had taken out. The policy named Daisuké Taniguchi, but X had been the contracting party from the beginning and had paid the premiums himself. Kido tells Rié that she can keep the insurance money and that there is no need to change the subscriber’s name; he offers to handle any problems that arise.

Because the family register listed Rié’s family home as the couple’s legal residence, Kido petitioned the Miyazaki Family Court, which had jurisdiction over Town S’s resident families, for two revisions. The first would cancel the record of Daisuké Taniguchi’s removal from the register due to death, restoring him as legally alive and resolving the contradiction behind the missing-person report. The second would remove Daisuké from Rié’s register and restore her maiden name, Takemoto. The result was an annulment of the marriage on grounds of error and the erasure of Rié’s second marriage from her register; it also meant that Hana, her child with X, became legally illegitimate.

The court required Rié to appear in person and requested DNA evidence to establish that X was not Daisuké Taniguchi. Kido gathered samples from X’s belongings, including hair from his clothes, nail clippings, an electric razor, and a toothbrush, and took them back to Yokohama. The procedure offered a way to correct the record, but its legal classifications had consequences for the living as well as for the identity of the dead.

Investigation and Changing Hypotheses

Even after the family-register revisions succeeded and the immediate legal issues were resolved, Kido made no progress for more than ten months in identifying X. The case remained with him while other work, including a death-by-overwork lawsuit, occupied his time. He had no expectation that the fake account Misuzu and Kyoichi were managing would produce a breakthrough, and he found himself at a standstill.

A conversation with Nakakita gave the investigation a new direction. While assisting people affected by the earthquake in the Tohoku region, Nakakita had been asked about tsunami victims whose existence the government had not recorded because they lacked family registers. Kido learned that a child born within three hundred days of a divorce was legally presumed to be the former husband’s child. Some women who had divorced after domestic violence and then had a child with a new partner avoided registering the birth, leaving that child without a family register. The result was not only a problem of legal parentage: people without registers could be missing from the state’s records of both birth and death.

That legal gap changed the shape of Kido’s question. He had imagined that Daisuké might be living under X’s identity after exchanging registers with him. Now he considered the reverse possibility: X might have been unregistered, leaving Daisuké unregistered in his place. If Daisuké had taken the identity of someone absent from official records, even the discovery of a body might not establish his murder; it could instead be treated as unidentified. Kido’s theory remained provisional, but the lack of a register made the usual evidence of existence—testimony, DNA, photographs, personal effects—feel precarious beside the state’s inability to recognize a person.

Later, after meeting Omiura and hearing Kadosaki’s account of a mentally handicapped drifter, Kido’s confidence in the explanations he had entertained shifted again. He had once dismissed Kyoichi’s claim that X was a dangerous criminal as delusion, then began to take it seriously after Omiura made him question how alike X and Kido might be. When he believed X could be Kenkichi Kobayashi’s son, he found relief in imagining X as blameless, someone shaped by misfortune. The drifter’s description unsettled that account. Kido recognizes that his own sense of relief depends on which version of X he can inhabit, and worries about his sanity for reacting this way.

Using Omiura’s hint, Kido infers that the drifter’s real name was Yoshihiko Sonézaki and that he was the first person with whom Makoto Hara exchanged family registers. Hara later crossed paths with Daisuké and made another exchange—or possibly took Daisuké’s register without consent. Under Kido’s reconstruction, Hara then lived as Daisuké Taniguchi and met Rié in Town S, while the real Daisuké, if still alive, used the name Yoshihiko Sonézaki. Rather than treating this chain as settled fact, Kido seeks a way to test it: he asks Kadosaki to arrange a meeting with the shoplifter who calls himself Makoto Hara, and the man agrees.

Personal Attachments and the Work of Narration

Kido’s casework is accompanied by attachments that do not fit neatly into professional categories. In October, Misuzu invites him to the Yokohama Museum of Art for an exhibition and says she wants to consult him about the search for Daisuké. He rearranges his schedule to meet her for lunch as well. He has followed her social-media posts, which show ordinary scenes and outings, and the two grow more intimate in their online exchanges after that meeting, although he never learns what she had meant to ask about the search.

The unresolved case also reaches into Kido’s marriage. He has reason to believe that his relationship with Kaori is coming apart, because its dynamics resemble those of couples whose divorces he handles. His attention to other people’s fractured identities and relationships therefore unfolds alongside doubt about his own domestic life, without supplying an easy distinction between the lawyer who observes a crisis and the man who may be living one.

After returning from the boxing club, Kido writes down the story of Makoto Hara as Kosuge and Yanagisawa told it to him, using hurried notes to help him remember. He reorganizes the scattered information gathered over the year because he intends at last to report his findings to Rié. Writing becomes part of the investigation: the separate accounts must be made coherent enough to communicate, while their status as testimony and inference remains visible.

Narrative Role and Significance

Kido’s investigation repeatedly turns on the difference between a person and the records that make that person legible. A missing-person report cannot proceed normally when the named man is officially dead; a marriage can be erased through correction of a register even though the life lived within it remains; a child can be left without recognized parentage; and someone without a family register can fall outside official accounts of both life and death. His legal work can repair a record, but it cannot make the human consequences disappear.

As an investigator, Kido builds explanations from incomplete and changing accounts rather than arriving at certainty in a single discovery. His hypotheses about X shift with each new piece of evidence, and his emotional response shifts with them. By reconstructing Hara’s sequence of assumed identities and preparing to tell Rié what he has learned, Kido becomes the person who must turn scattered traces into a story—while recognizing that the story’s coherence does not itself settle every uncertainty.