Metamorphosis motif

The metamorphosis motif connects classical stories of bodily change with the novel’s human transformations through exchanged family registers. In Akira Kido’s reading of Ovid and his recollection of Makoto Hara, becoming someone else is never simply a way to leave the past behind: it can arise from violence, grief, or desperation, and its consequences may include love and happiness as well as a deeper fall from grace.

Ovid and the limits of explanation

On a flight from Haneda Airport to Miyazaki, Kido turns the pages of the Iwanami paperback edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He bought it after searching online for a primary source on the myth of Narcissus, hoping to complete a question Sota had asked him two Christmases earlier. The text proves too intricate for the simple explanation he wanted to give his son, but Kido continues reading for its own sake. The book’s transformations therefore begin as a failed attempt to make myth easily teachable, then become a means for Kido to think through the less orderly changes in human lives.

Ovid’s account of Narcissus’s birth shifts Kido’s understanding of the youth’s fixation on his reflection. Narcissus was conceived when the river god Cephissus assaulted the water nymph Liriope. Kido sees the water Narcissus stares into as more than a surface for self-love: it is bound to his parents and to the violence between them, an origin that made his existence possible but cannot be undone. To see himself, Narcissus must look toward that origin; he cannot erase the past or return to it. The myth thus makes self-recognition inseparable from a history that the self cannot choose.

Stories of change and their costs

The book offers no answer to Sota’s question about why Narcissus transforms, but its other tales give Kido a varied set of examples. Phaethon loses control of his father Helios’s sun chariot and is struck down by Jupiter before he can burn the earth; his grieving sisters, the Heliades, become trees and shed amber tears. Actaeon is changed into a stag after seeing Diana bathing, then killed by his own dogs, who no longer recognize their master. Daphne, pursued by Apollo after Cupid’s intervention, laments her beauty and becomes a laurel tree. Each change follows a different pressure or calamity, and transformation offers no guarantee of rescue: grief persists as tears, the altered body becomes a fatal estrangement, and escape from pursuit takes the form of becoming a tree.

As these myths pass through Kido’s mind, he extends the pattern beyond the classical world to the many people who exchanged family registers through Omiura. Like Ovid’s figures, they may have been driven to become different beings by sorrow, desperation, or pressure from others. Their outcomes diverge: some find love and happiness, while others fall further from grace. The comparison does not make the register exchanges equivalent to miraculous bodily metamorphoses. Rather, it gives Kido a way to understand how a change of identity can be forced upon a person and how the same act of transformation may lead toward radically different lives.

Hara and the wish to become another

Kido’s thoughts finally settle on Hara. Narcissus, on realizing that the reflection is his own, cries out with a wish to depart from his body; Hara, too, had wanted to leave his body. But their longings point in different directions. Narcissus might have learned to love himself if he could have left his body, whereas Hara wanted to become someone else, to love another and be loved in return. Kido also considers that Hara’s attempt to become a stranger may have been, from the beginning, a search for self-love—not merely love for the proper name “Makoto Hara,” but for the person Hara believed ought to have existed.

That interpretation binds the motif of transformation to identity and affection rather than treating it as a disguise alone. Hara’s assumed life as another person does not erase the life he had before; it brings him into relationships and a family, while leaving his earlier history part of what he carries. His transformation can be understood at once as an effort to escape himself and as an effort to find someone within himself who could be loved. The myth of Narcissus and Hara’s history remain distinct, but their juxtaposition makes both stories turn on the difficulty of meeting oneself through an identity one cannot wholly leave behind.

Trees, time, and recognition

Later, at the logging site, Kido imagines what may have occupied Hara as he worked with a chainsaw. Ito has told him that cryptomeria takes fifty years to mature. Trees Hara cut had been planted by earlier generations; those he planted would be felled by generations to come. Against that long span, Kido imagines Hara’s attention fixed on a nearer wish: finishing work early, returning to Rié and the children, and lying exhausted on a futon beside them after putting the children to bed. In that ordinary happiness, Kido thinks, Hara’s many ordeals may have made the moment feel more immediate and powerful.

The thought draws Kido into a reverie in which his sense of himself and of passing time falls away. When he opens his eyes, he sees a logger walking through the rain and briefly mistakes him for Hara. He tries to decide what he would have said if it really had been Hara: after his second suicide attempt, Hara had begun his life again in order to stay alive, and Kido wishes he could have told him that he understood. In his mind, Hara stops, turns, and smiles softly. Kido recognizes the encounter as imagined, but the moment gives form to a wish that had not previously come clearly to him: he wishes they could have met.

The motif’s significance lies in holding change and continuity together. Mythic transformations turn bodies into trees or animals, while the family-register exchanges alter the identities under which people live; neither form makes its causes or consequences disappear. Kido’s final vision does not undo Hara’s death or supply the meeting they missed. It instead brings Kido, through imagining Hara’s work, family life, and renewed effort to live, closer to an understanding he can no longer communicate. Transformation remains a passage into another form of existence, not a clean break from origin, memory, or loss.