Kido–Rié lawyer–client relationship

Kido and Rié’s lawyer–client relationship is built from an earlier period of bereavement and legal difficulty, then renewed when the death of Rié’s second husband leaves both his identity and her marriage in doubt. Kido does more than advise her on procedure: he pursues the records and evidence that could clarify who her husband was, while Rié relies on the calm, kindness, and steadiness she remembers from their previous dealings. The case gradually becomes personal for Kido as well, linking professional responsibility to his hope that the dead man was worthy of Rié’s love.

Earlier Trust

During the divorce mediation that followed the death of Rié’s son Ryo, Kido was the lawyer whose gentle manner had soothed her. That earlier support gave their later professional relationship a personal foundation: when Rié needed help again, she did not approach an unknown legal representative but returned to someone associated with a difficult period in which she had felt steadied and understood.

The circumstances of the new case were markedly different. After her husband died in a logging accident, Rié reported her concerns to the police, but the detective focused on filing a missing-person report for Daisuké Taniguchi rather than answering her question about the identity of the man she had married. Two weeks later, the station told her it could not find anyone by that name on its missing-person list and said there was no way to investigate her husband’s identity at the time. With no meaningful answer from the police, Rié turned to Kido.

Her decision rested on more than professional confidence. The years since she had returned to her hometown had abruptly begun to feel unreal, while her earlier life in Yokohama, after Ryo’s death, had become especially vivid in memory. Kido had been her lone bedrock in that period. When she called to explain her lack of faith in the police response, he answered in the calm voice she remembered.

Legal Repair and Investigation

Kido’s first proposal was to resolve the conflict between Rié’s family register and the Taniguchi family’s records. If her dead husband had not actually been Daisuké Taniguchi, Kido reasoned, Rié had no reason to keep using the Taniguchi name. She agreed, though the name still carried emotional weight for her: she associated it with her late husband, yet after meeting Kyoichi she had felt that continuing to use it was like introducing herself under a stranger’s name.

He also addressed the immediate question of the life-insurance payment. Although the documents named Daisuké Taniguchi, Kido explained that X had been the contracting party from the outset and had paid the premiums, so Rié did not need to repay the money or change the subscriber information. He offered to handle any problems that might arise. This advice separated the legal consequences of the false name from the question of the husband’s true identity, allowing Rié to retain the payment while the investigation continued.

The more extensive remedy required action at the Miyazaki Family Court, which had jurisdiction over the family registers of households residing in Town S. Kido petitioned for two revisions: first, to cancel the record that listed Daisuké Taniguchi as removed because of death, restoring him on the official register as living; second, to remove that name from Rié’s register and restore her maiden name, Takemoto. The resulting annulment of the marriage on grounds of error erased Rié’s second marriage from her family register, with the consequential legal status that Hana, her child with X, became illegitimate.

The court required Rié to appear in person and requested DNA evidence that X was not Daisuké Taniguchi. Kido gathered possible samples from X’s effects—hair from clothing, nail clippings, an electric razor, and a toothbrush—and took them back to Yokohama. The request showed the gap between the clear personal reality of Rié’s marriage and the proof the formal process needed: their shared life did not by itself establish that the man recorded under Daisuké’s name was someone else.

A Case That Expands

Kido’s work was not confined to correcting Rié’s register. He investigated the identity of X, and the matter remained with him for more than ten months despite competing professional demands, including a death-by-overwork lawsuit. Once Rié’s register had been revised and the urgent legal matters were settled, he reached a standstill. He did not expect the fake online account run by Misuzu and Kyoichi to produce a breakthrough, and the central question of who X had been remained open.

A possible new line of inquiry emerged through Kido’s colleague Nakakita, who had been assisting people affected by the Tohoku earthquake. Nakakita described children left without family registers because of the three-hundred-day rule: under the Civil Code, a child born within three hundred days of a divorce was legally treated as the former husband’s child, and some women in difficult circumstances did not submit birth notifications. In the aftermath of the tsunami, people without registers could be absent from official accounting even as they lived or died. Hearing this, Kido reconsidered the assumption underlying his investigation. Perhaps X had been someone without a family register, and perhaps Daisuké had taken that unregistered identity in an exchange. If Daisuké had disappeared into a person absent from official records, the state might not recognize his death even if the body were found.

Kido also followed the trail of Daisuké’s recorded address before the move to Town S. The register attachment pointed to a very cheap, deteriorated apartment in Osaka City’s Kita district, where the building management office was nearby. Kido proposed that he, Rié, and Kyoichi go together, but Kyoichi went to the office first, saying he had business in Osaka. The company president recognized the photograph of Daisuké as someone who had lived there, but did not recognize X’s face. That testimony suggested that Daisuké had still been living under his own identity in Osaka before encountering X and losing his name and family register. Kido’s investigation thus depended on records and witnesses beyond Rié’s immediate legal case, and Kyoichi’s independent inquiry supplied a concrete lead where the police had failed to act.

Professional Concern Becomes Personal

Rié continued to wait for Kido’s findings, though she feared the truth might be disturbing and wanted urgently to know who her husband had been. She understood that the answer mattered not only for clearing the uncertainty around his existence but also for making sense of her own past. Kido told her that he had made progress, even though he had not yet identified X. Because the investigation was being conducted for a modest sum, Rié did not press him to move faster; her dependence on his work therefore included both trust in his judgment and an awareness of its limits.

The case also unsettled Kido’s own view of X. He had hoped that, whatever hardships lay behind the deception, X had been a decent person. The possibility that X might have escaped the fact of being Kenkichi Kobayashi’s son by imposing that past on someone else made it harder for Kido to understand the man—and himself. Kido suspected that he both envied and admired X’s apparent ability to discard a past and begin again. His interest was not simply investigative: he recognized in the wish to live another life a broadly human longing, though acting on it required a recklessness few people possessed. His own Zainichi background helped him imagine why someone might hide an identity, but his hope that X had been worthy of Rié’s love also sustained the investigation emotionally.

Continuing the Work

After hearing the account of Makoto Hara from Kosuge and Yanagisawa at a boxing club, Kido returned home and wrote down the story as best he could from hurried notes. He then reorganized the material collected over a year of investigation, intending at last to report his findings to Rié. The act of assembling the scattered information marked a further stage in their relationship: Kido remained her lawyer, but he had also become the person responsible for bringing together the fragments that might explain the man she had loved and the identity under which he had lived.

The relationship’s central tension is that legal procedure can repair some consequences of deception without making the past simple or whole. Kido secures changes to Rié’s official status and pursues evidence about X, yet the investigation remains entangled with uncertain records, missing people, and the possibility that a person can disappear from public recognition. For Rié, his work offers a route toward understanding; for Kido, it becomes a sustained inquiry into borrowed identity, moral responsibility, and the possibility of beginning again. Their bond remains professional in form, but its force comes from the trust and personal history that make the case more than a file to be closed.