Kido recognized X's true identity at the death row art exhibition

Kido’s recognition of X at the death-row prisoners’ art exhibition turns scattered clues into a new account of X’s identity: X is Makoto Hara, the son of executed murderer Kenkichi Kobayashi, and the man previously understood to be X had exchanged family registers with him. The discovery does not arrive as a single revelation. A set of landscapes first stirs recognition, then the exhibition’s account of an identity-switching murder gives that recognition a possible shape, and later photographs and testimony confirm it. The sequence makes the exhibition a turning point in Kido’s investigation—and shows how drawings, names, and records can preserve traces that official identities obscure.

The Exhibition and Its Clues

Kido is moving through the display before a talk begins when he stops at a frame crowded with political slogans and a series of nude female illustrations. Their poses and composition recall Omiura’s postcards. Kido reverses the apparent direction of influence: Omiura’s drawings seem to imitate the pictures in the exhibition. A hand-copied Heart Sutra displayed nearby is another connection, since Omiura had asked Kido to obtain the same text. Kido wonders whether Omiura had seen the exhibition or read about it, and whether his description of himself as a chump had been an exasperated hint that Kido had missed the source of the copied images.

A different group of works holds Kido’s attention just before he is ushered to his seat: a modest landscape of hills, fields, and a stream; a picture of small birds among cherry trees; and a street corner with a mailbox, utility poles, and plank barriers. The pictures seem familiar, but Kido cannot initially place them. Their plain, almost schoolroom quality contrasts with the more conspicuous work elsewhere in the display. The delay matters: he recognizes a likeness before he can explain it, and the pictures leave the question open while the talk proceeds.

The exhibition’s account of an old case supplies the missing context. When the speaker explains an insurance-fraud murder involving the exchange of identities, Kido connects the case to X’s impersonation of Daisuké Taniguchi. The realization makes the landscapes suddenly legible: they resemble X’s sketches, photographs of which Kido has on his phone from the investigation at Rié’s home. The places depicted are geographically different, but the style is identical. The match gives Kido a concrete link between the artist displayed in the exhibition and the man whose effects he has examined.

From Suspicion to a New Identity

The critic identifies the landscape artist as Kenkichi Kobayashi, executed for murder and arson in Yokkaichi in 1985. That fact sharpens Kido’s suspicion but does not yet establish who X is. Omiura’s postcard has associated the names Daisuké Taniguchi and Yoshihiko Sonézaki with one another, but Kido recognizes that the names alone do not prove that either man exchanged family registers with the other. His inference remains a hypothesis, built by combining a visual resemblance with a separate trail of names and identity changes.

After the talk, Kido shows Sugino a photograph on his phone. Sugino identifies the pictured man as Kenkichi Kobayashi, the painter of the displayed landscapes. Kido realizes that the face is not X’s, although it looks remarkably similar. The resemblance prompts him to make a guess, but the discovery arrives faster than he can work through its implications. Sugino then supplies the family connection: Kenkichi had a son named Makoto, who took his mother’s maiden name, Hara, after his parents divorced. The exhibition has brought together the likeness in the paintings, the identity of their artist, and a son whose name is not yet the name by which Kido knows X.

Kido develops the hypothesis through another connection. Makoto Hara had been imprisoned with Omiura at Yokohama Prison, a facility that held B-class convicts. Their shared incarceration makes it plausible that Omiura could have known Hara and arranged a family-register exchange. Kido therefore considers a reversal of his earlier assumption: X may be the real Makoto Hara, while the man formerly imprisoned for compulsive shoplifting took Hara’s family register through Omiura. If so, the apparent connection between X and Daisuké is part of a wider history of exchanged identities, not a straightforward identification of X as Daisuké.

Confirmation Beyond the Gallery

Kido’s suspicion about X’s parentage gives him a possible explanation for why X would have wanted a different past: the burden of being Kenkichi Kobayashi’s son. At this stage, however, the explanation remains conditional. It rests on the relationship inferred from the exhibition, the matching sketches, and Omiura’s apparent role in the prison-based exchange. The narrative does not treat the gallery discovery itself as sufficient proof; the hypothesis must still be tested against people and records connected to Hara’s earlier life.

Later, Kido shows a picture of X to Kosuge and Yanagisawa. Both recognize him as Makoto Hara. Kosuge produces an old photograph of Hara wearing red boxing gloves and posing as a fighter. Although Hara was leaner in the photograph, the men identify him without doubt as the same person as X. The old photograph turns the resemblance and stylistic match into an identification confirmed by people who knew Hara’s former appearance. Kido’s intuition at the exhibition is vindicated, and his physical reaction registers the force of seeing a long-inferred connection confirmed.

When Kosuge asks how Hara died, Kido says he worked in forestry and was involved in a logging-site accident, withholding sensitive details. The identification thus links the man in the old boxing photograph to X, the landscape sketches, and the death already known to Kido. The exhibition’s role is not to explain every part of that life, but to redirect the investigation toward the person behind X’s assumed identity and to make the subsequent confirmation possible.

Significance of the Recognition

The recognition is structured as a progression from resemblance to inference to corroboration. Kido first sees pictures that recall X’s work but cannot identify their source; the exhibition’s discussion of an identity-switching crime supplies a conceptual link; Sugino names the artist and his son; Omiura’s prison connection makes the register exchange plausible; and Kosuge and Yanagisawa finally recognize Hara in an old photograph. Each clue changes the meaning of the previous one without making any single clue carry the entire proof.

The paintings and photographs function as evidence alongside names and family-register histories. X’s sketches do not depict the same locations as Kobayashi’s landscapes, yet their identical style points to a connection that a name alone would not establish. The old photograph, in turn, does not simply resemble X to Kido: former associates identify it as Hara. The contrast between these forms of evidence—artistic manner, written identity, visual likeness, and human recognition—shows how the investigation reconstructs a person across identities that official and social records have separated.

The exhibition also reframes the purpose of looking. Kido had been bored by an art critic’s attempt to discuss the prisoners’ pictures only as works of art. For him, the landscapes are not isolated aesthetic objects: they carry a trace of the life behind X’s present name. The recognition does not erase the uncertainty and harm surrounding identity exchange, but it changes the question Kido is pursuing. What first appeared to be a case about X impersonating Daisuké becomes, through the exhibition, an inquiry into X as Makoto Hara—and into the concealed family and prison history that made that identity difficult to see.