Kido impersonates X at Miyazaki bar

Kido’s impersonation of X in a Miyazaki bar turns a brief act of passing into an intimate experiment with another man’s life. By introducing himself as Daisuké Taniguchi and telling the story of Daisuké’s estrangement from his family, Kido discovers that performing the borrowed identity can feel less like deception than a way of entering another person’s inner world; afterward, the pleasure is shadowed by guilt toward Rié and by his awareness that he cannot abandon his own life as X did.

The business trip and the stranger’s freedom

The episode begins with Kido alone in Miyazaki on a work trip. Because it is baseball spring-training season, the only room he can find is a double at the Sheraton Grande Ocean Resort. Its comfort feels excessive for an ordinary business stay, and the room’s apparent promise of intimacy sharpens his solitude: the white sheets suggest a scene of physical closeness, while the view opens onto a golf course, sea, and sky. Kido eventually gives up on the fantasies the room provokes, eats the hotel restaurant’s fried chicken with tartar sauce, and takes a taxi into the city for a drink.

The trip unsettles him not because he is unfamiliar with business travel, but because in Miyazaki he is neither at home nor a tourist with a defined place in the city. He feels like no one in particular, a complete stranger to everyone around him. That anonymity is not merely an absence of recognition; it feels liberating. The episode establishes the condition that makes the impersonation possible: away from the familiar roles of lawyer, husband, and father, Kido can try out a story that belongs to someone else.

A borrowed name at the bar

When the bartender guesses that Kido comes from near Tokyo, Kido instead tells him that he grew up in Gunma, at Ikaho Onsen. He says his elder brother inherited the family inn and that, as the second son, he left home, adding that he never got along well with his family. The details are not Kido’s biography. They belong to Daisuké Taniguchi, whose past Kido has taken up as his own for the evening.

The disclosure prompts the bartender, who manages the bar, to share a parallel family history. His parents worked in construction, and his own elder brother took over the business. That resemblance creates a conversational opening: Kido’s false account is met not with suspicion but with recognition. When the bartender gives him a card, Kido says he has run out of his own and supplies the name Daisuké Taniguchi. The bartender accepts it without question. In that moment, the assumed name gives Kido more than cover. He imagines that if the two men later crossed paths in town, they would recognize one another and nod; the stranger has acquired the beginnings of a local connection.

Telling Daisuké’s past as his own

Over another glass of Stalinskaya, Kido continues the performance by recounting Daisuké’s history, including the organ-donor agreement that eventually led to an irreparable break with his family. He describes these events in a detached manner, as though they happened long ago, and occasionally gives a woeful grin. The bartender responds with measured sympathy, acknowledging the hardship without pressing too far. Kido feels he could continue talking until he drank himself under the table in tears.

The scene’s force lies in a reversal Kido does not fully intend. He has come to speak as Daisuké, but as he puts the story into words he feels himself drawing closer to it. The performance does not simply imitate an already complete identity; the act of narration makes the borrowed past emotionally accessible. Kido has little awareness of treating the conversation as a performance, and that very lack of distance makes the experience powerful. At the bar, a false name and an invented personal claim open onto a feeling that is genuine, even though the life giving rise to it is not his.

From exhilaration to guilt

After returning to Yokohama, Kido continues to remember the two hours he spent impersonating X as a source of inexpressible joy. He recalls being nervous, excited, and dizzy, and begins to imagine a new kind of hobby: synchronizing himself with another person’s life story in order to inhabit that person’s inner world vicariously. The idea attracts him precisely because it is not innocent. He recognizes it as a shameless game with a bitter aftertaste, an attempt to take pleasure in tragedy by moving inside the life shaped by it.

When Kido returns to Miyazaki, he quietly wishes he could become again the self he had left downtown: the continuation of X’s life while X was impersonating Daisuké. But he cannot bring himself to revisit the bar. The next day after the original encounter, he met Rié and saw her distress at learning the truth about X’s identity. Her pain makes Kido feel guilty for having enjoyed his own masquerade. He doubts the bar would offer the same thrill now, and recognizes that there is almost nothing left he needs to say as Daisuké Taniguchi. The wish to resume the borrowed life therefore meets an ethical limit: Kido’s imaginative pleasure cannot be separated from the real harm the deception caused Rié.

The life Kido cannot exchange

Kido also considers the difference between the life he borrowed and the one X left behind. He does not know why X could throw everything away and begin again under Daisuké’s identity. He is vaguely jealous of that capacity, yet knows that however tired he becomes of his own life, he cannot make the same break. His thoughts return to the outdoor hot spring at the Sheraton and to how much his son would enjoy it. The small imagined pleasure of sharing the place with his child marks a tie to ordinary family life that Kido cannot simply discard.

He wonders whether X’s earlier life contained any comparable joy worth preserving. If it did not, Kido imagines, X may have resembled the real Daisuké, who abandoned his past to escape the family bound to it—not merely by ceasing to hate them, but by seeking distance from a still more consuming hatred. Kido cannot determine whether taking up Daisuké’s past and carrying it forward offered X some form of redemption. The question remains unresolved, as does the gap between an identity that can be performed for two hours and a life that must be lived beyond the performance.

The episode thus gives Kido’s impersonation two sharply different outcomes. In the bar, another man’s name makes him feel briefly known, and another man’s history offers a way to approach emotions his own life does not readily release. Back in Yokohama, the same experience becomes both a tempting imaginative practice and a source of shame. Kido can enter X’s story, but he cannot become X without consequence; the borrowed identity enlarges his understanding of another life while making his attachment to his own more visible.