Makoto Hara

Makoto Hara is the real identity of the man Rié knew as Daisuké Taniguchi: a former boxer who built a family under an assumed name after exchanging family registers. His history links intimate domestic life to inherited stigma and criminal notoriety, but the story’s decisive turn is not merely that his name is uncovered. It is Rié’s recognition that the man she loved was Makoto, and that the three years and nine months they shared may have been the first time he knew true happiness.

Identity and Background

Makoto was born in 1975, the only child of Kenkichi Kobayashi. After his parents divorced, he took his mother’s maiden name, Hara. His childhood was marked by the violence of his father, whose later crimes made the family name carry an especially terrible burden. In 1985, when Makoto was ten, Kobayashi murdered three members of an acquaintance’s family during a robbery and set fire to the house. The story places Makoto, a child of the same age as Kido, in the aftermath of a public crime he did not commit but could not escape being associated with.

Kobayashi’s history makes that inheritance more complicated than a simple story of evil passed from father to son. Born in Yokkaichi in 1951, Kobayashi had himself grown up amid poverty and violence, left school, and later became absorbed in gambling and debt. He abused his wife and Makoto, though outsiders could still have mistaken the household for an ordinary family during Makoto’s early childhood. This background helps explain the pressure surrounding Makoto’s identity, without making his father’s actions his own.

From Hara to Taniguchi

Makoto became a professional boxer and passed his professional test on his first attempt. He won the East Japan Rookie King Tournament, including a title-fight knockout, and attracted attention before he was due to compete for the All Japan Rookie King Championship. At that point, however, he told his trainer he wanted to withdraw and sought advice about leaving the course his early success seemed to promise. He had chosen the ring name Katsutoshi Ogata by opening a phone book at random with another man; its characters meant “win,” a hopeful name he later regretted.

His later identity changes were not a single exchange. Kido reconstructs that Makoto first exchanged registers with Yoshihiko Sonézaki, a man with a mental disability, and subsequently took on the identity of Daisuké Taniguchi. Kido cannot establish whether that second exchange was fully consensual, and the account preserves that uncertainty. In any case, Makoto eventually lived as Taniguchi and met Rié in Town S. A photograph of the younger Makoto in red boxing gloves, shown to Kido by Kosuge, confirms that the man in the image is the person Rié knew as X.

The choice of Daisuké’s identity had particular weight. Daisuké described his register as desirable because it offered a clean past and no criminal record; others had repeatedly traded in pursuit of it. Daisuké initially wanted only to sever ties with his own family, but he drew a line at giving his name to someone with a criminal record or to someone who might scheme to claim the Taniguchi estate. After meeting Makoto, he believed the boxer wanted to make the best of the life he had left and felt that his own identity might help him start again. The two met only twice, but Daisuké remembered Makoto’s apparent purity and his determination to leave his old life behind.

Family and Private Life

As Daisuké Taniguchi, Makoto married Rié and became Yuto’s second father. Yuto had been old enough to form a deep attachment to him, and later spoke of the loss in terms of both memory and family identity. When Rié considered returning to her maiden name after the marriage was annulled, Yuto asked to remain Taniguchi. He explained that he had already lived under several surnames—Yoneda at birth, Takemoto after Rié’s first divorce, and Taniguchi from the start of elementary school—and did not want to keep correcting people who knew him by his father’s name. He also worried that Makoto’s family had rejected him and that the family might forget him too.

Makoto’s place in the household continued to shape Yuto after his death. Rié remembers Makoto praising the boy as thoughtful, and Yuto’s later care for his grandmother’s wish to have goldfish reflects the attentiveness Makoto had noticed in him. Rié sees Yuto tending the fish, watching over Hana, and reading as ways he tries to hold himself together while grieving. She also recognizes that Yuto had been especially attached to Makoto, whose presence in his life had begun when he was old enough to understand him as a father.

The family’s mourning is bound up with the name Makoto had concealed. For a year after his death, Rié’s husband had effectively been without a name: she knew him as Daisuké, but the truth of his life had not yet been restored to her. Learning from Kido’s report that he was Makoto Hara felt to her like meeting him again. She cannot simply replace one name with another. “Daisuké-kun” feels like a name belonging to someone else, while calling him “Makoto-kun” is difficult because he can no longer answer. Only after Kido leaves and she can look again at her husband’s photographs does she feel that he would have wanted her to call him by his real name and love him as a whole person.

Revelation and Reassessment

Kido’s investigation connects Makoto to Kobayashi through both documentary clues and the history of prison. Makoto had been imprisoned with Omiura at Yokohama Prison, a detail that makes it plausible that the two men knew each other and strengthens Kido’s theory that the man once imprisoned for shoplifting had exchanged registers with him. Kido initially treats Kyoichi’s accusations about X as delusions; after meeting Omiura and tracing the identities, he becomes able to imagine Makoto as someone burdened by the fate of being Kobayashi’s son rather than as the criminal Kyoichi had alleged.

That compassion is not steady. When Kadosaki describes the man using Makoto’s identity as mentally handicapped, Kido’s confidence falters, and he worries about how strongly his own emotional state depends on finding a sympathetic explanation for X. The investigation’s sequence of possible identities—Makoto Hara, Yoshihiko Sonézaki, and Daisuké Taniguchi—therefore reveals both the practical instability of names and the limits of Kido’s desire to make another person’s life answer his own anxieties.

Rié, too, must reconsider what she knows. She had remembered Kyoichi suggesting that her husband might have committed a heinous crime, and the news that Makoto was Kobayashi’s son makes the accusation newly disturbing. But Makoto himself had not committed those murders. Rié wonders whether she could have loved him if she had known his history from the beginning; she cannot give herself a confident answer, especially given her grief and the demands of raising Yuto. What she can say is that they fell in love through the life he lived under his assumed name, and that their relationship brought Hana into the world.

Change and Narrative Significance

Makoto’s deception has lasting legal and emotional consequences, but it does not erase the reality of his family life. Yuto’s insistence on keeping Taniguchi expresses a child’s claim on the name and relationship through which he knew his father, even as Rié has to confront the false identity on which their marriage was founded. His grief is not expressed only through direct talk: he reads Akutagawa’s “Asakusa Park,” a story about a boy separated from his father, and Rié recognizes that the book may have helped him communicate pain he had not put into words. His poem about a cicada’s abandoned shell likewise gives form to loss through an image of a body that has left its former covering.

Makoto’s own name becomes part of Rié’s continuing relationship with him. A name cannot restore his reply or settle every question about the life he concealed, but it allows her to approach his memory without mistaking the identity he borrowed for the entirety of the person she loved. Kido tells her that the three years and nine months Makoto spent with her were probably the first time he knew true joy, the culmination of his life. Rié finds the judgment reassuring, though she does not press Kido to explain why he needed to bring it to her in person.

The novel thus holds two truths together: Makoto’s assumed identity involved a serious deception, and his love for Rié and care for the children were not rendered unreal by its exposure. His history cannot be reduced either to his father’s crimes or to the name he borrowed. The restoration of “Makoto Hara” does not undo what happened; instead, it gives Rié a way to mourn and love the man beyond the alias, while the Taniguchi name remains meaningful to the son who remembers him as a father.