Personal identity and continuity of self

Personal identity and continuity of self are unsettled throughout the novel by a conflict between the person who lives a life and the name, history, or legal record through which others recognize that person. Makoto Hara’s life as Daisuké Taniguchi makes identity appear transferable, while the missing and unregistered show how official records can also fail to recognize someone at all. Yet the novel does not treat a changed name as a simple change of person: it follows the difficult work of living into a new history, remembering an old one, and finding language for someone who can no longer answer.

Identity Beyond the Name

The mystery that draws Kido into the case is not simply that a man used another name. The man Rié knew as Daisuké Taniguchi married her, had a child with her, and died under that identity, although the real Daisuké existed and his brother Kyoichi identified the deceased man as someone else. Public institutions had repeatedly accepted the assumed identity: officials updated the family register after marriage and death, while the man used a driver’s license and health-insurance card and made pension contributions. His account of growing up in Gunma raised no obvious discrepancy, but the photograph did not convince Kyoichi that he was looking at his brother. The contrast makes a name more than a private label: it is also a publicly maintained identity that can be sustained across ordinary dealings with government and society, even when the human being behind it is not the person the record claims.

Kido’s response is complicated by his own experience. He is third-generation Zainichi and became a naturalized Japanese citizen in high school; he understands why someone might conceal a name or heritage. What troubles him is that the imposture concerns not a fictional identity but a real person whose existence is independently established. The distinction directs the mystery away from the familiar act of hiding oneself and toward a more unsettling question: how can one person take up a life that is already attached to someone else?

Registers, Recognition, and Exclusion

The family register makes that question materially consequential. When Kido petitions the Miyazaki Family Court to correct Rié’s records, he seeks first to reverse the entry recording “Daisuké Taniguchi” as dead, so the genuine Daisuké will no longer be officially treated as a missing person who is already deceased. He then seeks to remove the false husband from Rié’s register and restore her maiden name, Takemoto, annulling the marriage on the basis of error. The remedy would erase the second marriage from the register and leave Hana legally illegitimate. Because the case is unusually complex, the court requires Rié to appear in person and requests DNA evidence that the deceased man was not Daisuké; Kido gathers hair, nail clippings, an electric razor, and a toothbrush from the dead man’s belongings. The proceeding makes clear that correcting a record is not merely a technical adjustment: the law’s account of a person can determine a spouse’s status, a child’s legitimacy, and whether another person is recognized as alive or dead.

A conversation with Nakakita broadens the problem from exchanged identities to lives that the state cannot see. Under Japan’s Civil Code, a child born within three hundred days of a divorce is legally presumed to be the former husband’s child. Some women who have a child with a new partner soon after leaving an abusive marriage have consequently refrained from reporting the birth, leaving the child without a family register. Such children may qualify for Japanese citizenship but remain absent from official records; in the tsunami, the state could neither know that they were alive nor count their deaths. Their existence and disappearance go unrecorded alike, as if there were no public beginning from which an ending could be counted.

That possibility changes how Kido thinks about the missing Daisuké. He had imagined the two men exchanging registers, with the real Daisuké perhaps living under X’s identity. But if X had never been registered, then Daisuké might have disappeared into that unrecorded status instead. A murder could go unrecognized as a murder if its victim had no official identity; even a recovered body might be treated as unidentified. If the tsunami had swept away the physical traces as well, the search would become more difficult still. The hypothesis remains speculation, not a resolution, but it exposes the dependence of investigation on evidence that can connect a body, a name, and a social history.

Nakakita traces the register’s long history to the late-sixth-century Ritsuryo system, when it served chiefly policing and taxation. In the Edo period, it also helped authorities monitor religious affiliation and expanded to include information such as birth, marriage, adoption, address, occupation, and death. Because this system tied a person to a place, it became ill-suited to the freedom of movement recognized at the beginning of the Meiji period. The modern register then served conscription and tax collection, incentives that led some people to abandon or falsify their records. Across these changes, the register has never captured everyone: vagrants, children born outside marriage and not reported, and children born overseas during wartime when diplomatic closures prevented a birth notification all mark gaps in its claims to comprehensiveness.

The register also represents more than administrative convenience. Kido observes that people excluded from it can be shut out of the nation’s recognized social body and reduced to second-class status; Nakakita connects that exclusion to Japan’s assimilation policies on the Korean Peninsula. Nakakita suggests that residence certificates now handle much identity management and that the My Number system’s joining of tax and social-security data may make the family register redundant. Kido counters that connected systems might make identities easier to trade, while biometric management would make evasion harder. The exchange leaves identity suspended between vulnerability and control: records can provide recognition, but increasingly joined records can also make the state’s identification of individuals more difficult to escape.

Overwriting a Life

When Kido finally speaks with the missing Daisuké, the man asks to be called Sonézaki. He describes the identity exchange as more than taking on a name: after a year, he says, a person becomes someone different because the past and everything attached to it have been switched. When Kido calls him Daisuké Taniguchi, he initially does not recognize the name as his own. His former hatred of the Taniguchis has faded so thoroughly that, seeing Kyoichi on Facebook, he takes him for the comical owner of an unimportant country inn. The new identity has altered not only how others address him but also the emotional perspective from which his former relationships appear.

Sonézaki distinguishes that change from simply trying to suppress memory. Cutting off relationships and moving elsewhere allows the past to fade, he explains, but deliberate forgetting cannot erase it. Instead, a person must cover the old story with another until it is no longer recognizable. Kido had assumed that taking an identity meant living out the trauma of the person whose life was borrowed. Listening to Sonézaki leads him to revise that assumption: the new life does not merely reproduce another person’s suffering; it overwrites the remembered past with a different account of who one is.

That account is not wholly detached from the person Sonézaki once was. He says he has never met the real Sonézaki and cannot picture him directly, so he imagines him through Hara: he constructs a version of his past by asking what Hara might have been like as the son of a yakuza. In that invented history, Sonézaki even has a period as a boxer. Kido recognizes the echo, telling him that Hara had boxing talent and won the East Japan Rookie King Tournament. Sonézaki is surprised that Hara never told him. The borrowed history is therefore not a clean replacement with no connection to its source. Hara remains a model through which Sonézaki can imagine the absent person he claims to have become, while the imagined past also draws on things Hara genuinely lived.

Sonézaki says he once revealed his background as the son of a yakuza to a hostile coworker at a bar night. The disclosure changed the coworker’s attitude. For Sonézaki, the family name becomes a source of confidence: knowing the powerful background he is concealing helps him understand his attempt to live honestly. He describes himself as no longer the same person he used to be, while acknowledging that his image of his former self is built indirectly, through Hara. The self that emerges is neither a simple return to an original identity nor a seamless adoption of another’s. It is an account assembled from rupture, chosen concealment, and remembered fragments.

Naming the Dead

For Rié, identity becomes a question of how to address a husband who can no longer respond. After Kido’s report identifies him as Makoto Hara, she feels as though she is meeting him again. But learning the proper name does not by itself restore their relationship: for a year she has remembered a husband without knowing his name, and she must decide what to call the man she loved.

The new facts complicate even the intimacy of a familiar suffix. Hara was two years younger than Rié, rather than two years older as she had believed, which helps explain why she had instinctively called him with the diminutive “kun.” Yet “Daisuké-kun” now feels like a name belonging to someone else, while “Makoto-kun” does not immediately feel certain either. She cannot test the name by calling and hearing his reply. Only after Kido leaves and she can look at her husband’s pictures on her computer for the first time in a long while does she feel that Hara would have wanted her to use his real name and love him as Makoto, not as Daisuké. Naming becomes an act of renewed recognition, but one that must proceed without confirmation from the person being named.

Rié also learns that Hara was the son of Kenkichi Kobayashi, whose crimes she finds difficult to reconcile with her family’s history. She had thought murder belonged to a world wholly separate from her own, and Kyoichi’s earlier suspicion that her husband had committed a terrible crime returns to her. The report, however, confirms the distinction she had hoped for: Hara himself did not commit those crimes. His inheritance of a criminal father’s history does not make him the author of that history. At the same time, Rié suspects that his painful story about Daisuké may have been Hara’s way of conveying his own deep wounds. She cannot know why he chose that particular distortion; she understands only that a false account can communicate real pain while also making it harder for another person to understand what needs care.

Narrative Significance

The novel sets personal continuity against several imperfect forms of evidence: faces, family memories, names, documents, photographs, and stories told after a death. A government record can make an impostor publicly legible as Daisuké, while a brother’s recognition contests that identity; an absent register can make a person’s life and death nearly impossible for the state to count. Neither paperwork nor memory is sufficient on its own, and the effort to correct one account can alter the legal status of people who did not choose the deception.

Hara’s transformations also resist a single answer to what makes a person the same person over time. He lives under a borrowed legal identity, while Sonézaki imagines an unknown self through Hara and tries to overwrite rather than erase his past. Rié, in turn, must revise her picture of her husband without reducing him to either his assumed name or the newly discovered name of his birth. The novel’s emphasis on telling and retelling makes identity less like an unchanging object than a life that must be interpreted in relation to others. Yet revision does not undo consequences: the past may be covered, a record amended, or a name newly spoken, but the relationships and losses shaped by those histories remain.