Rié

Rié’s story turns on a painful distinction: the man she loved had lived under a false name, but the happiness they made together was not therefore false. After loss and legal upheaval, she learns that her husband was Makoto Hara, not Daisuké Taniguchi. The revelation unsettles her sense of the past without erasing the three years and nine months they shared, and her effort to tell the truth also gives Yuto a way to understand the father he mourns.

Identity and Family History

Before meeting Hara, Rié was married to another man and had a son, Ryo. After Ryo died, she could not accept her first husband’s insistence that the family should move forward together. Her refusal was not a claim that he alone had caused their child’s death; she agonized over her own responsibility. Rather, she could no longer imagine sharing a future with him. During the yearlong divorce mediation, Kido listened to the husband’s grievances and ultimately helped Rié secure both the divorce and custody of Yuto. The husband had resisted relinquishing custody, but consented after Kido confronted him with evidence that he was seeing another woman.

Rié later married a man she knew as Daisuké Taniguchi. Their life together included Yuto, who regarded him as his second father, and their daughter Hana. But the name on the marriage and public records belonged to another man: the real Daisuké Taniguchi, whose brother recognized that the deceased husband in Rié’s photographs was not him. The impostor had nevertheless passed official identity checks, married under that name, and used it in ordinary dealings, including driving and medical care. The discrepancy made Rié’s bereavement inseparable from a deeper question about who her husband had been.

The legal correction was not simply a change of name. Because Rié’s family register listed her family home in Town S as her legal residence, Kido petitioned the Miyazaki Family Court to undo the record of Daisuké’s death and then remove him from Rié’s register. The second revision would restore her maiden name, Takemoto, and annul the marriage on the basis of error. It would also leave Hana legally illegitimate. The court required Rié to appear in person and requested DNA evidence that her husband was not Daisuké; Kido gathered samples from Hara’s personal effects to support the case.

Bereavement and the Search for the Truth

Rié’s grief is layered rather than resolved. At the cemetery, she watches Yuto keep his attention on the flowers and Hana, and recognizes that he, like her, is enduring losses without readily speaking about them. He had lost Ryo, his grandfather, and the man he had understood as his father. Rié also knows that Yuto’s attachment to his second father was especially strong because he was old enough to remember him closely. In caring for her son, she sometimes wishes that the dead man were still present to advise him.

Her own mourning changes shape with time. The sharpness of grief gradually recedes, but its fading gives way to a less immediate loneliness; she declines suggestions that she remarry, saying she has had enough. Thinking about death frightens her, yet imagining Ryo and her father waiting for her offers some comfort. She cannot fully believe that picture, and the thought of making Ryo wait for decades troubles her, but the imagined reunion helps her endure the present. Her grief thus neither disappears nor stays fixed: it moves between absence, memory, and an uncertain hope.

Meanwhile, Kido’s investigation gives Rié a reason to wait for an answer even though she fears what it might reveal. She wants to know who her husband was because the truth could clear not only the haze surrounding his existence but also the uncertainty surrounding her own past. When Kido reports that he has made progress but still has not identified X, she remains patient, mindful of the modest resources available for his investigation. The inquiry eventually reaches the question of the family register itself: the mechanism that had made Hara’s assumed identity legible as Daisuké’s also made it difficult to recover the person behind it.

Motherhood, Names, and Inheritance

The return to Takemoto threatens to remove more than a surname from Yuto’s daily life. Having been born a Yoneda, then become a Takemoto after Rié’s first divorce, and then a Taniguchi when she remarried, he has already lived through several family names. Now in middle school, he tells his mother that he wants to remain Yuto Taniguchi because classmates and other students know him by that name. For him, Takemoto feels like his grandparents’ name, and having to correct everyone would make him feel displaced again.

His objection is also an act of remembrance. Yuto asks when Rié will make a grave for the father whose ashes have remained in an urn, and tells her that she hardly talks about him anymore. He fears that if Rié returns to Takemoto, the family will forget the man whose own family had turned away from him. Rié realizes that her son’s earlier silence had concealed an attachment she had not understood. His insistence makes the legal choice personal: restoring her own register need not require him to surrender the name through which he remembers his father.

When Rié finally begins to explain the truth, she starts by telling Yuto that there is something she has kept from him. She says plainly that his father’s name was not really Daisuké Taniguchi. Later, after Kido has delivered his findings in person, she tells Yuto that the lawyer has investigated his father for more than a year and that she now knows why he changed his name. This disclosure is not merely an answer to a mystery; it is a decision to let her son share knowledge that might be difficult to bear, rather than leave him to interpret her silence as forgetting.

Makoto Hara and the Meaning of Their Marriage

Learning the name Makoto Hara does not instantly restore Rié’s intimacy with her husband. For the year since his death, he has effectively been without a name in her understanding, and reading the name in Kido’s report feels like meeting him again. Yet she cannot simply replace Daisuké with Makoto and expect recognition to follow. She had believed her husband was two years older than she was; learning that he was two years younger explains why she had instinctively used the familiar suffix “kun.” But calling him “Daisuké-kun” now feels as if she has been using someone else’s possession, while “Makoto-kun” does not immediately feel secure either. She cannot ask him whether the name is right.

Only when she is again able to look at his photographs on her computer does she feel that he would have wanted to be called by his real name—to be loved as Makoto, not only as the identity he had borrowed. The name changes her access to memory, but it does not make their shared life reducible to deception. Rié asks herself whether she would have loved him had she known his history from the beginning. She wants love to be independent of the past, yet suspects that, while grieving and raising Yuto, she might not have been able to embrace a partner with such a tortured history. There is no answer she can recover. What she does know is that through the life begun under a lie, they loved one another and had Hana.

Kido’s reason for travelling to see Rié becomes clear when he tells her that the three years and nine months Hara spent with her were, he believes, the first time Hara knew happiness, and the culmination of his life. Rié finds this deeply reassuring. The length of their marriage is brief, but the account lets its meaning exceed its duration: it gives her a way to understand the life Hara had made with her without pretending that his past was simple. She does not press Kido to explain why conveying this in person mattered so much to him.

Change and Narrative Significance

The truth also changes how Yuto understands Hara’s care. After hearing the report, Yuto withdraws to his room, then returns with a new interpretation: his father had treated him as he wished his own father had treated him. Rié agrees, while adding that Hara had also cared for Yuto for his own sake. The exchange allows the boy to connect Hara’s painful history to the kindness he received without reducing that kindness to compensation for the past.

Rié must also reckon with the report’s account of Hara’s father, Kenkichi Kobayashi, and his crimes. She had believed such violence belonged to a world entirely separate from her own, and is distressed to discover that it was connected to her family. She wonders whether Kyoichi, who had suspected her husband of a terrible crime, would feel vindicated. But Hara himself had not committed those crimes, as she had hoped. His parentage explains part of the burden he carried; it does not make him responsible for his father’s acts.

In the end, Rié does not settle every uncertainty about love, identity, or the past. She looks at the memorial photographs of her father and Ryo and at the picture of her family of four, acknowledging that Hara is gone and the two children he left behind are growing up. She decides that the three years and nine months were happy for her too—so happy that the memories and everything that followed from them may sustain her for the rest of her life. Her conclusion is not that the deception did no harm, but that the truth can be faced without surrendering the reality of the love lived inside it.