Omiura

Omiura is the identity broker who arranged family-register exchanges for people seeking to live under another person’s identity. He is not present in the scenes covered here, but his work links Makoto Hara’s transformation into Daisuké Taniguchi to a wider, unnamed population of people who exchanged registers. His eventual conviction for a scam does not undo those transformations; instead, the novel leaves his clients’ varied fates in view after their broker has been caught.

Role in the identity exchanges

Kido suspects that a threatening message sent to an online account may belong to an “aftercare” service supplied by Omiura’s associates to people who had exchanged family registers. This is Kido’s theory, not a confirmed explanation of the message or proof that Omiura himself sent it. The possibility nonetheless extends Omiura’s influence beyond the original exchange: the arrangement may have included continuing assistance, or at least the appearance of it, for people living under their new identities.

When Kido asks Daisuké whether he knew who he was exchanging registers with, Daisuké answers without surprise that the other man was Makoto Hara. Kido then asks whether Omiura brokered the exchange. Daisuké is uncertain of the name, but recognizes the broker from Kido’s description: a man with a face like a blowfish and a strongly shady manner. Kido confirms that the description fits. Their exchange establishes Omiura as the intermediary in the register swap that placed Hara in Daisuké’s identity, while also showing that Daisuké remembered the broker more readily by his appearance and manner than by name.

A remembered salesman

Daisuké recalls Omiura making extravagant claims, including that he knew a man who had lived to the age of two hundred. Kido laughs hard enough to nearly tip his coffee onto the table and notes that Omiura had told him three hundred. The escalating ages turn the broker’s sales pitch into a small comic refrain: even when describing a new life, Omiura seems to have relied on an implausible promise. The joke does not establish what Omiura actually promised his clients, but it does give Kido and Daisuké a point of recognition—and lets Daisuké begin to warm to the conversation.

The shift from recollection to present consequence is abrupt. Daisuké asks what Omiura is doing now, and Kido tells him that Omiura is serving time. Asked what for, Kido says that he was convicted of a scam. The exchange supplies the clearest outcome attached to the broker himself: he has been prosecuted and imprisoned, although the available account does not specify the scam’s details or connect the conviction explicitly to any particular register exchange.

Reach beyond one case

Omiura’s significance exceeds his personal appearances because his work made identity exchange available to a multitude of people, not only Hara and Daisuké. As Kido approaches Miyazaki, he thinks of the many people who exchanged family registers through Omiura and compares their transformations to the changes endured by figures in classical myths. Some, he imagines, may have been driven by grief or desperation, or pressured by others; some may have found love and happiness, while others fell further from grace. The passage offers these as possibilities rather than documented biographies, emphasizing how little one can infer from the bare fact of an exchange.

That range prevents the broker’s practice from being reduced to a simple escape story or a single criminal transaction. A new identity may make another life possible, but it does not guarantee a better one. Omiura’s clients are linked by the mechanism he supplied, not by a common motive or outcome. Kido’s thoughts keep their different circumstances in the frame even as the narrative returns to his own investigation and to his wish to speak with Rié in person.

Narrative significance

Omiura remains a figure at a remove: Kido suspects his associates may still be involved in post-exchange support, Daisuké recalls meeting a shifty broker, and the news of Omiura’s imprisonment arrives as a brief report. This indirect characterization makes the consequences of his business more expansive than his own story. He is the broker behind a specific exchange, but also the point of origin for a network of altered lives whose later courses cannot be neatly gathered into one moral lesson.

The contrast between Omiura’s absurd longevity claims and the real uncertainty facing those who exchanged registers sharpens the novel’s treatment of transformation. The broker can sell an imagined future, but he cannot determine what that future becomes. His conviction closes one part of the account; the lives set in motion through his work continue, divided between happiness, misfortune, and outcomes still unknown.