Kido explains Makoto Hara’s identity and life to Rié

Kido explains Makoto Hara’s identity and life to Rié through a report that closes a long investigation while opening a more intimate reckoning with the dead man’s name and past. Kido does not merely deliver information by email: he makes the journey to see Rié, and his account culminates in the assurance that her three years and nine months with Hara were the first true happiness of Hara’s life.

Investigation and decision to report

After meeting the real Daisuké and interviewing him about the family-register exchange with Hara, Kido completed his report for Rié. He still wanted to know more about Hara, but decided that, for the time being, he should bring to an end an investigation that had occupied him for a year and three months. The report therefore marks both a stopping point in the inquiry and the transfer of its findings to the person most intimately affected by them.

The investigation’s close did not make a written handoff sufficient for Kido. He wanted to discuss the report with Rié in person, though he recognized that this alone did not explain why he felt compelled to return. He also hoped that another visit would help him find closure. His choice to travel turns the report from a mere compilation of facts into an encounter between investigator and client, shaped by what the story has made Hara mean to each of them.

The return to Miyazaki

Kido arranged to see Rié the following day but arrived early, hoping also to meet Ito, president of Ito Lumber, and visit the mountains where Hara had worked. He had asked Rié for an introduction because he wanted to see Hara’s former workplace. When Ito seemed guarded about the approach, Kido gave no elaborate pretext; he simply said he was interested in forestry, and Ito agreed to show him the logging areas. This additional visit to the landscape associated with Hara forms part of Kido’s effort to approach the life behind the report, rather than treating it as a closed file.

The narration distinguishes Kido’s practical reason for the journey from the feeling that exceeded it. Discussing the findings face to face mattered, but so did the irrepressible desire to return and the hope of closure. That mixture makes the trip significant without reducing it to a professional obligation: Kido carries the results of his investigation to Rié because the case has become personally consequential to him, even though he does not fully explain that consequence to her.

Rié receives Hara’s name

The report gives Rié a name for the husband who had gone unnamed in her understanding of the previous year: Makoto Hara. Learning it feels, in effect, like meeting him again. Yet a correct name cannot by itself undo the estrangement produced by discovering that the man she loved had lived under another identity. Rié still has to decide what to call him, and the question makes the report’s revelation personal: it is not only about identifying the dead but about finding a form of address that can hold both the man she remembers and the history she has just learned.

The newly learned age difference helps Rié understand a small but persistent detail of their intimacy. Hara was two years younger than she had believed, not two years older; in retrospect, that explains why she had felt moved to use the affectionate diminutive “kun.” But “Daisuké-kun” now feels as though it belongs to someone else, while she cannot simply adopt “Makoto-kun” without knowing whether that name would have felt right to him. The absent man cannot answer. Only after Kido leaves, when Rié is able to look at her husband’s photographs on her computer for the first time in a long while, does she feel that he had longed to be called by his real name and loved as Makoto, not as Daisuké.

In this sequence, the report changes the meaning of remembered details without erasing the life Rié shared with Hara. His name, age, and concealed past revise her picture of him, but the photographs and her sense of what he had wished for give her a way to address that revision. The revelation is therefore not a simple replacement of one identity with another: Rié must reconcile the name used in their life together with the name that belonged to the man beneath it.

A past entangled with crime

The account also confronts Rié with Hara’s family history. She had never heard of Kenkichi Kobayashi and could not remember whether she had seen news reports about his crimes. Their gruesome details made her hesitate over whether to conceal that part of the report from Yuto. Murder had seemed entirely separate from the world she inhabited; learning that it had been connected to her family unsettled that assumption. She recalled Kyoichi’s earlier suggestion that her husband had committed a heinous crime and imagined his satisfaction at the news that Hara had been the child of a killer. But the distinction the report establishes matters to her: Hara himself had committed no such crimes, as she had hoped was true.

The report’s account of Hara’s boxing years and his anguish over inherited traits leads Rié to worry about Hana, who might one day despair on learning that a murderer’s blood ran in her veins. Rié is not herself troubled by that biological connection, but she recognizes that her daughter could respond differently. Yuto stands in another position because he has no biological link to Makoto; Rié thinks that, had he been biologically related, she might have been more cautious about showing him the report. Thus the revelation affects the family in distinct ways: it raises a future question for Hana, while altering what Rié considers appropriate to tell Yuto.

What the report cannot settle

After learning what the lies had concealed, Rié asks herself whether she would have loved Makoto had she known the truth from the beginning. She wants to believe love does not need the past, but suspects that, while grieving her own losses and raising Yuto, she might not have been able to embrace a partner with such a tortured history. There can be no certain answer. What she does know is that, through the life made possible by Hara’s deception, they fell in love and she had Hana. The report therefore does not turn their marriage into either a simple fraud or an unblemished romance; it leaves Rié facing the difficult coexistence of deception, love, and the family that grew from it.

The length of Kido’s report makes Rié wonder why he went to such trouble for her and why he came all the way to Town S when a call or email would have been enough. She gains a glimpse of his reason only when, after going through the main substance of the report, he tells her: “I think that the three years and nine months that Hara-san spent with you was the first time that he ever knew happiness. True joy, I suspect. As short as your time together was, it was the culmination of his entire life.”

Rié finds the statement deeply reassuring. She understands that Kido made the journey to tell her this in person, but does not press him to explain why it matters so much to him. The report thus performs two kinds of work: it gives Rié the history and identity she needs to reconsider her husband, and it carries Kido’s personal judgment that the brief life they shared was not a mere interval within Hara’s troubled past, but its culmination. Kido’s investigation ends without answering everything he still wants to know; his visit gives Rié a way to see Hara again, now under the name Makoto, and to hold the happiness they made alongside the truth of how it began.