Maintaining the self by inhabiting others’ pain

Maintaining the self by inhabiting others’ pain is the practice through which Kido approaches an inward life he cannot bear to examine directly. He describes holding himself together by living other people’s pain, and later discovers that he can temporarily inhabit X’s history by impersonating the man X had pretended to be, Daisuké Taniguchi. The practice is at once an imaginative form of connection and a troubling performance: it gives Kido a way into other lives without resolving what his own self consists of.

A Self Approached Through Other People

Kido explains that thinking directly about himself makes him feel sick, despite his efforts to overcome that difficulty. Instead, he lives through other people’s pain, sometimes telling lies about an unfortunate past as if it were his own. He calls this a kind of honesty achieved through lies, but stresses that such episodes are brief and that he cannot entirely let go of himself. His account does not present the borrowed story as a complete escape: even while taking on another history, he remains conscious of a self he cannot leave behind.

That distinction makes his practice more than a simple wish to deceive. Kido admits that the stories are false, yet he uses them to approach emotional material that direct self-reflection keeps out of reach. He hopes the need to behave this way will eventually pass, but his confession offers no certainty about when or how. His promise to tell the narrator the truth from then on marks a wish for candor, not proof that the underlying difficulty has disappeared.

X as an Unfinished, Recurring Story

After hearing Rié’s account, Kido cannot stop thinking about X. The man’s story returns while Kido walks, rides trains, or eats with his family, recurring like a melody that will not leave his mind. The comparison makes the preoccupation feel involuntary: X has become not merely a case Kido has heard, but a life Kido repeatedly turns over in his thoughts.

Kido’s attention is drawn to the possibility of starting again as a different person. He had once entertained ordinary fantasies of becoming like someone he admired, but those wishes had remained passing daydreams. X makes the prospect more consequential. X had lived under Daisuké Taniguchi’s identity, and Kido tries to understand the life that could be formed through such a change without claiming to know X’s reasons for it.

The novel’s own account of its making broadens this pattern. Its novelist says that writers look for people who might serve as models, then transform such individuals through fiction until they become symbols. Kido becomes absorbed in one man’s life, but the novelist locates the protagonist’s significance in Kido himself, seen from behind as he follows that man. The movement of attention therefore repeats at another level: the novelist watches Kido watching X, and the reader is invited to notice the chain rather than treat any one identity as self-contained.

The Bar Performance and Its Afterlife

In Miyazaki, Kido tells a bartender that his name is Taniguchi, Daisuké Taniguchi. The bartender accepts the introduction, and Kido immediately senses that this small exchange has made him less of a stranger in town. He orders another glass of Stalinskaya and recounts Daisuké’s past as though it were his own, describing how agreeing to donate an organ led to an irreparable break with his family. He speaks in a detached manner, occasionally smiling sadly; the bartender responds with measured professional sympathy.

What matters to Kido is not only the story he tells but the closeness he feels while telling it. Although he has little awareness of his actions as a performance, he feels that speaking Daisuké’s history brings him nearer to unity with that history. The episode makes his earlier idea of living others’ pain concrete: another person’s account becomes a temporary structure in which Kido can feel connected, even though the identity he claims is not his own.

The experience continues after Kido returns to Yokohama. He remembers the joy of the two hours spent impersonating X and recognizes in it the excitement associated with tragedy. Rather than merely watching tragic films or reading tragic books, he begins to imagine synchronizing himself with another person’s life as a hobby—a way of inhabiting an inner world vicariously. He also recognizes its bitter aftertaste. The pleasure depends on another person’s painful history and on Kido’s own unauthorized masquerade.

When he later returns to Miyazaki, Kido quietly wishes he could again become the self he had left in the downtown bar: the continuation of X impersonating Daisuké. Yet he does not go back. The following day he sees Rié’s distress over the truth of X’s identity and feels guilty about having enjoyed the impersonation. He also believes there is little left that he needs to say as Daisuké. The impulse remains, but the encounter with Rié changes its meaning and limits his willingness to repeat it.

Empathy, Responsibility, and the Limits of Identification

Kido’s ability to imagine himself in another person’s position also shapes how he thinks about strangers’ deaths. He does not claim to feel equal grief for every death: his own death terrifies him, an acquaintance’s death saddens him, and a stranger’s death ordinarily leaves him unmoved. Yet by imagining strangers as himself or as people he knows, he can feel the terror or sadness that would otherwise be absent. The account distinguishes emotional identification from spontaneous concern; imagining another life can produce feeling, but it does not mean that Kido already experiences every stranger’s suffering as his own.

That gap bears on his marriage to Kaori. Kido gives regularly to Doctors Without Borders and UNICEF, while Kaori has understood his generosity as one of his professional quirks. Their difference becomes sharper in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake. Kaori had already donated to the Red Cross, but she could not understand why Kido would give his time and energy to strangers when his feelings did not sincerely go out to them. She wondered whether his efforts came from concern for his professional standing or shame at his own lack of feeling; Kido, looking back, concedes that he had changed since they met.

The disagreement is also practical. When the earthquake struck, Sota was two and a half, aftershocks continued, and the next major tremor could not be predicted. Kaori saw no virtue in Kido leaving his wife and child to help other families at such a time, and her friends did not defend his choice. Kido respected her straightforwardness, honesty, and intelligence, even as he tried to explain his actions through ideas such as social presence and the public good. Their conflict shows that inhabiting others’ pain is not an uncomplicated moral credential: Kido’s wish to respond to distant suffering competes with responsibilities to people immediately dependent on him.

Narrative Significance

The practice links Kido’s private unease to the novel’s structure of observation and transformation. Kido becomes preoccupied with X and tries, briefly, to speak as Daisuké; the novelist, in turn, describes watching Kido absorbed in that pursuit. The prologue compares the arrangement to a painting in which one figure looks into a mirror and sees another version of himself from behind. Identity is not simply exchanged and settled: each act of looking or inhabiting sends attention onward, toward another person whose inner life remains partly inaccessible.

The novelist also acknowledges the ethical and artistic distance involved. He says that he spoke again with Kido and other people, investigated details Kido had left vague for reasons of confidentiality, and used imagination to shape the material into fiction. The admission parallels Kido’s practice without equating them: both involve approaching another life through a constructed account, but the novel makes the process visible rather than presenting it as transparent access. Its central question is therefore not whether Kido can literally become X, but what happens to his sense of self when another person’s history becomes the means by which he tries to feel and understand.