Makoto Hara and Rié’s marriage

Makoto Hara and Rié’s marriage was built on a concealed identity: Hara lived and married as Daisuké Taniguchi. After his death, the discovery that he was Makoto Hara did not simply replace one name with another. It reopened Rié’s understanding of their shared life, leaving her to hold together the fact of his deception and the reality of the love and family they had made.

Identity and the Marriage

When Kido recounts Hara’s life from the time he met Rié in Town S until his death, the story of the marriage emerges through the identity Hara had assumed. Rié had known her husband by the name Daisuké, and only after his death did she learn that his real name was Makoto Hara. The marriage therefore carried a gap between the man Rié believed she knew and the history he had concealed.

That gap mattered beyond official identification. For a year after her husband’s death, Rié had been left without a name for him in the fuller sense: she knew the person she remembered, but not the life and identity that belonged to him. Learning that he was Makoto felt to her like meeting him again. The new name brought him nearer, but it did not immediately resolve the estrangement produced by the revelation.

Relearning His Name

Rié’s difficulty was not merely deciding which name was factually correct. She had called her husband “Daisuké-kun,” using a familiar diminutive that now seemed to belong to someone else. She could not simply exchange it for “Makoto-kun”: the real name was true, but she could not know whether it was the name he would have wanted her to use.

The change came when, after Kido had left, Rié found she could look at the pictures of her husband on her computer again. In that moment she felt certain that Hara had longed to be addressed by his real name and loved as his whole self, rather than as the identity he had borrowed. Her movement toward “Makoto” thus became an act of recognition, not an attempt to erase the deception or restore the past unchanged.

The Past Behind the Deception

Kido’s report gave Rié a fuller account of Makoto’s painful life. She began to suspect that, by telling the story of Daisuké, her husband had been trying to communicate the deep injuries in his own past. She could not explain why he had chosen that particular way of telling it. The possibility that he was disclosing pain through a distorted account offered a way to understand his concealment, but did not make the distortion harmless: changing the apparent cause of an injury can make it harder to find the right treatment.

Rié also confronted the possibility that Makoto’s family history would change how she saw him. His father, Kenkichi Kobayashi, had committed terrible crimes, and Rié worried about what Hana might feel if she eventually learned the truth about her grandfather. Yet she was not troubled by the idea that a murderer’s blood ran in Hana’s veins; her concern was that Hana might herself despair upon learning it. Yuto, by contrast, had no biological link to Makoto, a difference that affected how cautiously Rié considered sharing the report with him.

The report also sharpened Rié’s recollection of Kyoichi’s earlier insinuation that her late husband had committed a terrible crime. She had wanted to believe that Makoto himself was innocent, and Kido’s account confirmed the distinction between his father’s crimes and his own life. The revelation connected her family to violence she had once thought wholly outside her world, without making Makoto responsible for what his father had done.

Love, Lies, and the Life They Shared

After reading the report, Rié asked herself whether she could have loved Makoto had she known the truth from the beginning. She wanted to believe that love did not need the past, but admitted that, while mourning her own losses and raising Yuto, she might not have been able to embrace a partner with such a tortured history. There was no way to settle that counterfactual. What she could say was that Makoto’s lies had nevertheless led to their falling in love and to the birth of Hana.

Kido gave the marriage a measure of meaning without asking Rié to excuse its false foundations. He told her that the three years and nine months Makoto had spent with her were, he believed, the first time Makoto had known happiness or true joy, and the culmination of his life. Rié found this deeply reassuring. It also explained why Kido had travelled to Town S to deliver his extensive account in person, though she chose not to press him about his precise motives.

Aftermath and Meaning

The marriage could not continue after Makoto’s death, and learning his identity did not undo the loss or make the deception disappear. Instead, Rié’s understanding of the relationship changed as she learned to distinguish the false name from the man she had loved. The past remained complicated: she could not know how the marriage would have unfolded under full disclosure, and she did not claim that the lies were inconsequential.

At the same time, Rié came to regard the years they had shared as happy for her too. Looking at the memorial photographs of her father and Ryo and at the picture of her family of four, she reflected on the husband who was gone and the two children he had left behind. She decided that those three years and nine months had brought her enough happiness that the memories, and everything that followed from them, might sustain her for the rest of her life. The marriage’s final significance lies in that unresolved conjunction: it began through an assumed identity, yet the happiness Rié remembers was real to her and, in Kido’s understanding, real to Makoto as well.