The Sheraton Grande Ocean Resort is the Miyazaki hotel where Kido’s business trip becomes a private encounter with desires and limits he cannot resolve. Its luxury makes his solitude more pronounced: looking out over the golf course and the sea, he imagines companionship, then measures his own inability to discard his life against X’s transformation into Daisuké Taniguchi.

Setting and Arrival

During baseball spring-training season, Kido can find only a double room at the resort. The unusually comfortable accommodation helps fuel Kaori’s suspicion about the trip, though the room is empty. From its window, Kido looks across the golf course toward the sea and sky; the view does not make the prospect of spending the night alone feel any less hollow.

Solitude and the Unfamiliar City

The room’s ordered, luxurious setting gives shape to Kido’s private fantasies of intimacy. He lies on the bed and recalls earlier experiences of physical closeness, imagining the warmth of another person beside him. He eventually sighs, leaves the room, eats the hotel restaurant’s specialty of fried chicken with tartar sauce, and takes a taxi into the city center for a drink.

Away from the hotel, Kido experiences Miyazaki as a stranger rather than a lawyer, husband, or father. Although he has traveled for work before, the anonymity of this city feels unusually freeing. He slows near the signs for parlors he had tried in his twenties, briefly feels drawn to enter, but continues on to a bar he had already researched. The resort thus marks the start of an evening in which he tests the appeal of being someone other than himself without fully acting on it.

The Resort and Kido’s Reflection on X

When Kido returns to Miyazaki, he still wants to recover the self he had left downtown on that earlier night—the self that had, in his imagination, continued X’s life under Daisuké Taniguchi’s identity. But after meeting Rié and witnessing her distress over the truth of X’s identity, Kido feels guilty about having taken pleasure in his own masquerade. He doubts the bar would give him the same thrill now and recognizes that little remains for him to say while impersonating Daisuké.

The hotel’s outdoor hot spring becomes a place where Kido repeatedly thinks of his son and how much the boy would enjoy it. That thought sharpens his envy of X’s apparent ability to throw everything away: Kido cannot imagine abandoning his own life, even when weary of it. He wonders whether X’s earlier life contained a joy worth preserving, and whether taking on another man’s past offered some form of redemption. The resort’s comforts therefore expose not an escape Kido can sustain, but the attachments that keep drawing him back to ordinary family life.

Narrative Significance

The resort’s double room and Kido’s recurring thoughts of his son hold solitude and attachment in tension. He can imagine becoming someone else, and for a time the unfamiliar city lends that possibility a charge; yet his son remains present in his thoughts even at the hot spring. The hotel concentrates the contrast between Kido’s temporary wish to step outside himself and X’s much more consequential abandonment of one identity for another, without resolving Kido’s larger questions about X’s deception or the love Rié shared with him.