Names and identity

Names and identity are central to the novel’s account of a man who lived and died under another person’s name, and of the family left to reckon with that deception. The name “Daisuké Taniguchi” is at once a legal identity, the name Rié used for her husband, and the name of a real man who never shared his life. When the records are corrected, the change does not settle what the husband meant to Rié and the children. Instead, the novel asks whether an identity can be reduced to a name, a government record, or even a truthful account of the past.

Official Identity and Lived Experience

Kido first encounters the case as a lawyer trying to understand an apparent contradiction. Rié’s husband had died under the name Daisuké Taniguchi, yet the actual Daisuké existed and was still represented in the family register. This was not merely a man introducing himself by an assumed name: officials had accepted his marriage and death notifications, and public records identified him as Daisuké. He had used a driving licence and health insurance card, paid his pension contributions, and given an account of growing up in Gunma that appeared consistent. But the actual Daisuké’s brother recognized from a photograph that the deceased was not his sibling.

For Kido, the case is especially difficult because it is not the familiar concealment of one’s own name or background. As a third-generation Zainichi Korean who became a naturalized Japanese citizen in high school, he understands why people might take Japanese names or conceal their heritage. The mystery is how another person could occupy the identity of someone who genuinely existed—and have that identity affirmed by the administrative machinery that ordinarily makes it legible. The contradiction sets legal verification against family recognition: documents attest to one man, while the brother’s memory and photograph identify another.

Stories That Make a Person Knowable

The case leads Kido to question how anyone can know another person through the past they tell. The present, he reflects, is shaped by what came before, but no one can recount an entire life; even an honest account is not the past itself. He considers whether love becomes mistaken if the story on which it rests is false, and whether a deliberate lie makes love meaningless or can give rise to a different love.

His marriage to Kaori gives the question a personal edge. She has shared memories of a life lived near her family and old friends, while Kido grew up far away in Kanazawa and had disclosed his Zainichi background early in their relationship. Yet he recognizes that he might have believed her even if she had presented a stranger’s past as her own. Knowledge of a person’s history depends partly on access to other people who can confirm it. If the person lives in an unfamiliar place and has cut off family and friends, verification may require a detective; the man Kido calls X had apparently avoided social media in just such circumstances. The name X is Kido’s provisional professional label, not an answer to the question of who the man was.

The Dead Man Without a Name

For Rié, the difference between a name and a person becomes most acute in grief. According to the family-register records, a man named Daisuké Taniguchi died. But the real Daisuké had a death of his own, and Rié cannot know whose death her husband had died. Her question, “Who died?”, joins the identity puzzle to the irreversibility of loss: the legal record names one man, but the person she loved cannot be made identical with him by paperwork.

Rié also resists Kido’s convenient label X. To her, assigning a code name without the person’s permission is an insult to his human dignity. When Kido uses it, she feels they are speaking of a stranger; she loses the thread of the conversation and is left with no name by which to call her husband as he recedes from her. The name she used in private, Daisuké-kun, carried the tenderness of their shared life: she usually reserved that suffix for a child or someone younger, and it seemed to fit his juvenile manner and sketchbooks. Yet Daisuké was also the name of a complete stranger. The intimate name remains bound to her husband even as its official referent is exposed as false.

Correction and the Unsettled Past

Five months after the court petitions were filed, around the first week of August, both were approved. DNA evidence established that X was not Daisuké Taniguchi, and the court process annulled the marriage recorded under that identity and restored Rié’s maiden name to her family register. Her past was formally corrected: she was no longer recorded as a widow and, in the eyes of the register, had been married only once.

But correction does not turn the error into a merely technical mistake. Rié recognizes that she had believed she married a man she had never met, announced that marriage publicly, and notified the government of his death without knowing what the real Daisuké was doing or where he was. The revelation leaves her with a harrowing uncertainty about whose life she herself is living. The register can revise a legal history; it cannot provide the missing name or restore the life she shared with the man who used it.

A Name as a Family Bond

The conflict over Rié’s restored surname reaches Yuto, who asks to remain Yuto Taniguchi. His name has changed with the family’s circumstances: he was born a Yoneda, became a Takemoto after Rié’s divorce, and became a Taniguchi when she remarried. Now in middle school, he does not want to explain another change to friends and classmates, or return to a name he associates with his grandparents. His objection is not just practical. He fears that leaving the Taniguchi name will make the man he called Dad no longer his father, reducing him to the child of his first father and making his second father only the husband of Rié’s second marriage.

Yuto connects the surname to the dead man’s place in the family. His father’s ashes remain in an urn, and he rebukes Rié for barely talking about him and for not having made a grave. He worries that the father’s own family turned their backs on him and that changing the name will mean forgetting him too. When Rié asks what sort of person his father was, Yuto breaks into tears; she strokes his back and cries with him. The scene makes clear that the legal truth of the identity and the emotional truth of the relationship do not coincide neatly. To Yuto, Taniguchi is the name under which his father was present in the family, and keeping it is a way to keep that relationship from being erased.

Narrative Significance

The novel treats identity as something produced across several imperfect forms of recognition: a person’s name, a family’s memory, a story told to a spouse, and an official record. None is sufficient on its own. The government documents repeatedly validate the impostor, while a photograph and a brother’s recognition expose the mismatch; Rié’s intimate memories preserve a husband whom the law can no longer name as she did; Yuto’s chosen continuity of surname expresses a bond that legal correction cannot decide for him.

The conflict is therefore not simply between truth and a lie. The lie enabled a marriage and family life, but its exposure leaves the people who loved the impostor facing both the falsity of his stated identity and the reality of their attachment. The novel’s recurring question is what survives when the name that organized a shared past proves to belong to someone else. Its answer is not a replacement identity but a difficult distinction: records can be amended, names can be changed, and a person’s narrated past can be revised, while grief and love remain attached to the life actually lived.