Makoto Hara's logging accident death

Makoto Hara’s fatal logging accident is both the end of the life he had rebuilt as Daisuké Taniguchi and the absence around which the survivors continue to orient themselves. The death leaves a double consequence: Hara is gone, while the real Daisuké’s official death notification is annulled and his status becomes that of a living missing person. For Kido, tracing the accident’s setting and consequences becomes more than a matter of completing a legal report; it is an attempt to approach a man he has come to feel he should have met.

Circumstances and Immediate Consequences

Hara dies in a forestry accident while living and working under Daisuké’s name. The excerpts do not reconstruct the precise sequence of the accident, but they make clear that the death was sudden, occupational, and bound to the particular dangers of logging. When Kido later tells the real Daisuké that Hara has died, the news changes how Daisuké understands the life Hara lived in his place. He asks what Hara had got himself into after taking over the identity, and Kido recounts the period from Hara’s meeting with Rié in Town S to his death.

The legal consequences sharpen the strangeness of the loss. Kido tells Daisuké that the facts have come to light and that Daisuké’s death notification has been annulled; officially, Daisuké is now listed as missing and alive. Daisuké had wanted Hara to continue living as him, yet had also been disturbed by the thought that the second son of the Taniguchi family remained alive somewhere. Hearing that Hara is dead while his own status has changed forces him to reconsider what Hara’s assumption of his identity meant. The exchange of identities did not exchange their deaths: Hara’s life ended, while Daisuké remains a living person whose whereabouts are unknown.

Logging Work and the Conditions of Risk

Kido’s later visit to Miyazaki gives the death a material setting. He travels there partly to discuss his report with Rié in person, but recognizes that this is not the whole reason: he feels an irrepressible desire to return and hopes the visit will bring closure. Before his appointment with Rié, he arranges to meet Ito, the president of Ito Lumber, asking Rié to introduce them because he wants to see where Hara used to work. Rather than inventing an elaborate pretext, Kido tells Ito he has become interested in forestry through his work on the estate of Daisuké Taniguchi.

Ito takes Kido to a logging area roughly forty minutes away. It is not the exact site where Hara died, but Ito says it is similar and relatively close. That distinction matters: Kido is not shown the fatal moment, but he is brought into the kind of landscape and working environment in which it occurred. On the drive, Ito explains that his company logs national forests by purchasing rights, depends in part on government subsidies, and faces competition from imported materials. Biomass generators have made wood saleable, leaving the market in decent condition even if it is not booming.

The surrounding system is also unsettled by disputed land ownership. Ito says that inherited mountain land has become unwanted, multiplying claim holders and leaving some parcels without a clear owner. Cut-rate crews buy small plots beside contested land, then cut and haul trees from areas whose ownership is uncertain. Ito describes the practice as a problem for the industry and notes that even checking old family registers can produce a tangle of competing claims. The logging accident therefore belongs to a workplace shaped not only by physical danger but by the difficult management of forest land, commercial pressures, and irregular ownership.

The Accident and Its Witnesses

Ito blames himself for what happened to Taniguchi, still praying at the altar every morning and remembering that he had never seen a major accident since taking over the company from his father. Hara’s death, he says, occurred at the one time he accepted a site with poor conditions, for a client he felt unable to refuse. He was not present when the accident happened. His account does not establish that the site conditions alone caused the death, but it makes clear that he carries the decision as a source of guilt.

Ito describes logging as exceptionally dangerous. Judging which way a tree will fall remains difficult even for an experienced worker, especially when the tree is bent; machinery can also slip off cliffs, and workers face snakes and wasps. He says he warns the workers every morning to be careful above all else. As he explains the circumstances of Hara’s death, Ito sounds distraught. Kido waits while he regains his composure and can tell, without looking directly at him, that he is holding back tears. The response confirms that Hara’s loss is not merely an item in an estate file: people who knew him under different names continue to mourn him, and Kido senses that no one speaks badly of him.

At the worksite, the danger is visible without being reenacted. Ito warns Kido not to wander too far from the entrance. Beyond a cleared space wide enough for a truck, a machine with a long orange neck grips logs, lifts them, and strips their branches. A few workers are visible, and beyond a flat expanse of stumps the land falls away into a steep slope. Because of the rain, there is no logging that day; the work is limited to other tasks. Ito explains that forestry has become mechanized and is easier on the body than it once was, though it remains far from easy. The machinery and the steep terrain make the site legible as a workplace, but cannot fill in the unseen interval in which Hara died.

Forest Time and Kido’s Imagined Meeting

Ito describes each tree as having a life of roughly a hundred years: about fifty years growing on the mountain, then another fifty as building material in a house. The measure connects the living forest to human use and stretches the work beyond the span of any one worker. For Kido, that scale becomes a way of imagining Hara’s days with a chainsaw. The trees Hara cut had been planted generations earlier; those he planted would be cut by workers generations later. Against that extended cycle, Kido imagines that Hara’s immediate thought was probably not the full span of time but finishing work and getting home to Rié and the children. After a hard day, putting the two children to bed and lying exhausted beside them may have made Hara feel happy, with his earlier ordeals intensifying rather than diminishing the value of that ordinary family life.

Kido’s reflection shifts from forestry’s measurable time to an experience he cannot measure. He loses track of whether minutes or hours pass, standing in the rain with his head bowed. When he opens his eyes, he sees a logger walking across the site and briefly mistakes him for Hara. The vision does not restore the dead man or disclose the accident; it exposes the meeting Kido now wishes had been possible. He imagines Hara stopping, turning, and smiling, and realizes that he would have wanted to tell him that he understood. Hara, Kido reflects, had begun his life anew after his second suicide attempt in order to remain alive. In that imagined recognition, the pursuit changes direction: Kido no longer only follows the traces of Hara’s past but confronts his wish to have met the man himself.

Significance of the Death

The logging accident is a death within a specific labor system, not an abstract interruption of the plot. The forest’s contested ownership, the company’s economic conditions, the physical hazards of falling trees, and Ito’s decision to accept a poorly conditioned site provide the circumstances through which the death can be approached, even though the fatal event itself remains offstage in these scenes. The gap between explanation and direct witness is important: Kido can visit a similar mountain, hear a supervisor’s remorse, and see the machinery, but he cannot recover the moment or ask Hara what it meant to him.

That impossibility also gives the accident its emotional force. Hara’s death leaves Rié’s family bereaved, Ito burdened with guilt, and the real Daisuké confronting the life and death of the man who had lived under his identity. It draws Kido back to Miyazaki even when an email could have conveyed his report. At the worksite, a stranger briefly becomes Hara in Kido’s sight; the mistake is not a revelation about the logger but a recognition of Kido’s own longing. The accident cannot be undone, and the living cannot exchange places with the dead. What Kido can do is follow the evidence of Hara’s working life until the distance between investigation and mourning becomes impossible to keep intact.