Kido finds and meets the missing Daisuké Taniguchi

Kido’s search for the missing Daisuké Taniguchi reaches its turning point when a hidden message on a fake Daisuké account leads him to a cautious correspondent using the name Yoichi Furusawa. The trail culminates in a meeting in Nagoya: the man Kido has come to interview is Daisuké, now living as Yoshihiko Sonézaki. The encounter confirms that Daisuké is alive, reveals his part in Makoto Hara’s exchange of identities, and forces both men to confront the pasts they tried to leave behind.

The lead from Misuzu

Kido’s investigation had stalled. He wanted to establish that Daisuké was safe and, if possible, learn what had happened when Daisuké met Hara, but he could no longer count on Kyoichi’s help. Kyoichi’s revulsion at Kenkichi Kobayashi’s crimes had turned into renewed condemnation of his brother for seeking out people and places he regarded as part of a criminal underworld. Kido therefore needed another route to the missing man.

That route appeared in an email exchange with Misuzu, whom Kido had not contacted for months. He mentioned seeing her on television; she replied that she had taken part in two counter-demonstrations, then added that she had quit Sunny at the end of the previous year. The news disappointed Kido, who realized that a visit he had considered making in January would have come too late. But Misuzu’s email also carried a more consequential lead: someone had reported the fake Daisuké account, and it had been temporarily blocked.

Misuzu had been uneasy about impersonating Daisuké on the account and had stopped posting there. After discovering a separate, long-overlooked Message Requests folder, she checked the fake account’s own hidden messages and found a warning from Yoichi Furusawa. The account had no photos and almost no posts. Its sender demanded that the fake account be erased, claiming to represent a legal client, but did not identify that client. Misuzu suspected that the person behind the warning was Daisuké himself. The account’s temporary block, followed by the absence of any further apparent legal action, left Kido with a plausible but unconfirmed path to the man he sought.

Establishing contact

Kido approached the unknown correspondent carefully. He decided not to mention Kyoichi, whom Daisuké might avoid, and to withhold Misuzu’s name as well. Rather than use his full name, Yoshihiko Sonézaki, Kido signed as Y. S., a name he believed Daisuké might recognize from the earlier identity exchange. His message explained that he was a lawyer representing Daisuké’s wife and referred to a message sent to the Daisuké account the previous October. He offered ways for the recipient to check his professional identity, while making clear that, if he had mistaken the recipient, the message could simply be discarded.

Kido did not expect an answer. Yet he reasoned that a man who had abandoned the family register and life associated with the name Daisuké Taniguchi might still be unsettled to hear that the person living under that name had died. If Daisuké had exchanged registers with Hara, he might also worry that Hara’s widow could expose the arrangement. Kido’s appeal thus rested on more than a request for information: it touched the possible connection between the life Daisuké had left and the death that had brought Kido to investigate.

The reply arrived shortly after two in the morning. Its sender questioned whether Kido was really a lawyer and pressed him with questions about the initials Y. S., the person who had created the account, and Kido’s connection to that person. Kido proposed a Skype call so that the correspondent could verify his identity by video, while offering to speak with Yoichi Furusawa first if the client preferred. The message was read immediately, but the answer came only that evening. The sender said the client still wanted the fake account deleted and wanted to know more about Daisuké’s death, then arranged to speak with Kido at eleven that night.

The exchange gave Kido grounds to take Misuzu’s suspicion seriously, though it did not yet prove who stood behind the name Furusawa. When the correspondent’s guarded questions arrived, Kido began to see them not as the assured tactics of a legal representative but as the anxiety of someone personally implicated. He felt sympathy for the man, recognizing that Daisuké’s attempts to conceal himself were not especially effective. The investigation had begun to turn: a contact initially framed as a professional warning was becoming a conversation with the person Kido had been trying to find.

The meeting in Nagoya

Kido and Misuzu arranged to meet Yoshihiko Sonézaki in Nagoya. They ate a simple lunch in the station building, then separated because Kido was to interview the man alone before Misuzu joined them. The meeting place was a branch of Komeda’s Coffee, supposedly a ten-minute walk from Nagoya Station. Unfamiliar with the area and confused by the nearby branches, Kido arrived about five minutes late.

Kido had seen photographs of Daisuké, but they were at least ten years old, and he was unsure whether he would recognize him. A barista seemed to know which customer he meant and led him to the smoking area. At a four-person table divided from its neighbor by a movable wooden partition, a man in a gray knit cap and an embroidered bomber jacket was waiting. Kido recognized him despite the years that had passed. The man was Daisuké Taniguchi, alive.

The recognition brought Kido face-to-face with the gap between his suspicions and the facts. He had continued to trust Hara, and the confirmation that Daisuké survived made him feel embarrassed by that faith. Daisuké, meanwhile, examined Kido’s business card without speaking and appeared intensely nervous. When Kido addressed him by his name, he hesitated before acknowledging it. He then asked Kido to call him Sonézaki and asked permission to smoke. Kido accepted the name he used in his present life, signaling that the meeting would have to proceed on terms that acknowledged both the man’s history and his effort to live beyond it.

A life overwritten

Daisuké described the effect of a family-register exchange as a gradual change in identity. A year after exchanging registers, he said, a person could feel like someone different. When Kido called him Daisuké Taniguchi, Daisuké had briefly wondered whom Kido meant. In his account, the exchange had changed more than official names: he felt that the parties exchanged their pasts as well. He had once hated the Taniguchi family, but after the swap he could look at Kyoichi’s Facebook page and see him merely as the unremarkable owner of a small-town inn.

Daisuké did not describe this as a simple erasure of memory. Cutting ties and moving elsewhere, he said, could make memories fade, but trying to forget an unwanted past could not remove it. His formulation was that the past had to be overwritten with another person’s until it became unrecognizable. Kido’s meeting with him consequently complicates the idea of an identity exchange as a mere administrative substitution: a borrowed name may come with new attachments and a new account of the self, even while the former life remains a source of anxiety and loss.

The conversation also clarified why Hara had been willing to exchange identities with him. Daisuké said that a person who had made only one exchange was unusual in the circles he knew. Hara’s past was so intense that Sonézaki had seemed almost his only possible partner; Daisuké did not think Hara had objected to Sonézaki’s being the child of a gangster. The difficulty arose when the two men met in person: Hara simply disliked him. Kido recognized that the man before him was the original Sonézaki, the person who had passed Hara’s register on to Tashiro. The exchange that had seemed a private arrangement between two men was connected to a wider chain of register trading.

Daisuké explained that the Taniguchi register had been desirable because it offered a clean past and no criminal record. Someone repeatedly traded for better registers in hopes of securing it. Daisuké, at the time, cared above all about severing his ties to his family and was prepared to exchange with almost anyone, but he drew the line at acquiring a criminal record or giving a potential schemer access to the Taniguchi estate. After talking with Hara, he came to think that his own former identity might help Hara start over. His account places the exchange between competing motives: Daisuké wanted escape from his family, while he also imagined that the identity he abandoned could offer Hara a chance at a different life.

News of Hara and the limits of escape

Daisuké said that he felt relieved to know that Hara was gone, even though he had wanted Hara to continue living as Daisuké for him. The thought that the second son of the Taniguchi family remained alive somewhere had also unsettled him. Kido then told him that the facts had come to light and that the death notification under Daisuké’s name had been annulled. Officially, Daisuké was now listed as a living missing person.

The news changed the terms of Daisuké’s understanding of Hara’s death. He asked what Hara had become involved in after taking on the Daisuké identity. Kido recounted Hara’s life from the time he met Rié in Town S until his death. Daisuké listened in silence, smoking repeatedly with his arms crossed; when Kido said that Hara had had a child, Daisuké opened his eyes wide and looked up, absorbed in thought. The man who had once wished Hara would keep his borrowed identity now had to hear about the family and death that had accumulated around that name.

The meeting is decisive because it resolves one mystery without resolving the moral and personal problem behind it. Daisuké is neither dead nor simply recoverable as the person he had been before the exchange: he is alive under another name and describes the process as becoming someone else. His testimony connects Hara’s exchange to the market for clean registers and to the further transfer of identities, while Kido’s disclosure of the death-notification correction makes the past newly present to him. The face-to-face encounter confirms the missing man’s survival, but shows that finding someone is not the same as restoring the life he left behind.