Rié and X’s marriage

Rié and X’s marriage joined two people who had disclosed profound grief to one another and made a family together, but it was founded on X’s concealed appropriation of Daisuké Taniguchi’s identity. Its decisive significance lies in the contradiction that follows his death: Rié remembers a gentle, devoted husband and three years and nine months of happiness, yet cannot know the name or whole person behind the man she loved. The marriage is neither undone by the deception nor made simple by the sincerity she experienced; its unfinished questions become part of the family’s inheritance.

Meeting and Shared Grief

Rié’s first response to the solitary customer who would become her husband was not romantic longing. When she feared that the town’s prying might drive him away, she felt a quiet sadness on behalf of someone who seemed alone. Their closeness developed gradually, through his returns to her family’s restaurant and the trust that accumulated between them. The relationship began in attention to his vulnerability, rather than in a sudden declaration of love.

That trust deepened when X told Rié about the family crisis that had driven him from home. He had been expected to give part of his liver to save his father, while his older brother, whose fatty liver disqualified him, and their mother did not relieve the pressure on him. X ultimately consented, telling himself that he was choosing to donate freely, but his father’s death left him feeling broken. He cut contact with his family and said he had no intention of seeing them again. Rié answered his painful disclosure with one of her own: she had lost a son to illness, her disagreement with her first husband over their child’s medical treatment had led to divorce, and she had returned home after her father died.

After listening without interruption, X reached across the table and gently sheltered Rié’s hand in his own, blistered from chainsaw work. The gesture carried their exchange beyond explanation: each had offered a history of loss, and each could meet the other without demanding that the grief be resolved. Rié found the touch comforting and realized she was happy. She had not expected this change in her life, but she considered whether to accept it.

A Home Built by X

After they married, X moved into Rié’s family home. They had a daughter, Hana, and X became part of a household that also included Rié’s son Yuto. At the time of the fatal logging accident in the mountains, Yuto was twelve and Hana was three. Rié hurried to the hospital on hearing the news, but her husband was already dead. Their shared life had ended abruptly, before they could settle everything between his past and their future.

X had been explicit about one unresolved matter: whatever happened to him, Rié was not to contact his family in Gunma or associate with them. She honored that request until the first anniversary of his death, when, after consulting her mother and friends, she wrote to his family. Her practical concern was his grave; she still had nowhere to entomb his ashes. The letter also exposed how much of their life remained unfinished. Rié wondered whether she should have pressed him to reconcile with his family, but his sudden death had left no opportunity to return to that question together.

The marriage’s happiness is preserved in sharp contrast to its abrupt end and its later exposure as an impersonation. Rié remembered X as gentle and generous: he spoke little, kept a mild expression, and never raised his voice to her or the children. That temperament differed markedly from her first husband, who had become irritable after Yuto’s birth and failed to notice the changes in Ryo. Rié believed she had never been happier than during her three years and nine months with X. Yet after his death, those memories seemed to spin and topple; the false identity that had remained invisible while their life continued now destabilized her recollection of it.

The Name and the Discovery

Rié’s marriage had taken place under the name Daisuké Taniguchi, which X used as his own. The deception surfaced when Kyoichi Taniguchi, believing he was examining evidence about his brother, looked through an album of photographs X had assembled from digital prints. Its final page showed Kyoichi with their parents at the family home. Kyoichi remembered why his brother was absent from the picture: Daisuké had taken it. Looking at the man in the album, Kyoichi told Rié that the person she had married was not his brother and that someone had impersonated Daisuké.

For Rié, the discovery made even the name in which the marriage had been lived feel unstable. Kido proposed sorting out the connection between her family register and the Taniguchis’: if her husband was not Daisuké Taniguchi, Rié had no reason to continue using that married name. She agreed, though she still felt sentimental about it because it belonged to her late husband. Since meeting Kyoichi, however, she had also felt guilty introducing herself as a Taniguchi, as if she were claiming the name of a stranger. The name had served as a sign of family belonging; after the revelation, it also marked the falsehood on which that belonging had been recorded.

Even the convenient label X felt to Rié like an injury. Kido used it to refer to the man whose real name remained unknown, but Rié refused to adopt a code chosen without that person’s permission. Each time she heard it, she felt the conversation turning toward a stranger; words slipped away because the label did not seem to reach the husband she remembered. At the family altar, she faced his photograph and could not find a name with which to call him back. She had called him Papa or Father in front of the children and Daisuké-kun when they were alone. Now Daisuké was the name of a complete stranger, while the man in the photograph had no known name of his own.

Love After the Deception

The uncertainty did not make Rié’s memories false in the same way that X’s account of his identity had been false. She recalled a quiet, serious man and imagined the childhood he had never wanted to discuss: a boy content to withdraw from the central group and play alone, who might later return vividly to former classmates’ memories. These imaginings did not supply the missing facts. They show instead how Rié had tried to know her husband through tenderness and attention when he had kept his past closed to her.

She wanted to believe that he had had a good reason to conceal who he was, but the possibility could not settle the question of why he had never told her. They had known one another for four and a half years before his death; Rié felt they had trusted each other enough, and that he had had opportunities to speak. Facing his photograph, she wished for a name she could use and wondered whether sincerity performed through a lie could become the ultimate deception. Her question holds together the competing truths of the marriage: the care she experienced was real to her, while the identity that framed it was not his to claim.

That contradiction also reaches the children. When Rié prepared to return to her maiden name, Yuto asked to remain Yuto Taniguchi. He had been a Yoneda, then a Takemoto, and then a Taniguchi; by middle school, classmates knew him by the last name he had carried for years. His objection was not only about the inconvenience of correcting people. He asked when his father would receive a grave and said that, after his father’s family had turned away from him, he did not want their own family to forget him too. Rié’s legal and personal wish to relinquish a false surname therefore met her son’s wish to preserve a connection to the father he had known.

When Rié asked Yuto what sort of person his father had been, he came to understand that X had treated him as he himself would have wanted his own father to treat him. Rié affirmed that this was part of the reason, but added that X had also cared about Yuto. The exchange does not settle the mystery of X’s birth identity; it gives the relationship another kind of evidence, grounded in how he acted as a father. The Taniguchi name can be false as a claim to ancestry and still hold the memory of a lived bond.

The Marriage’s Unresolved Legacy

Rié and X’s marriage remains defined by a difference between legal identity and remembered life. Kyoichi’s recognition establishes that X was not Daisuké Taniguchi, but it does not tell Rié who her husband truly was. The death that ended their marriage belongs to the man who lived and died beside her, while the name attached to that death belongs to someone else. Unable to call her husband by a known name, Rié imagines the dead as waiting for the living to call to them; someone with no name is left uncalled, sinking further into solitude.

The marriage consequently leaves no clean division between love and fraud. X’s impersonation deceived Rié about a fact fundamental to their shared life, and its consequences unsettled her sense of who she had married. At the same time, his gentleness toward her and his care for Yuto remain part of what she and her son remember. Yuto’s request to retain Taniguchi makes that tension a continuing family question: whether a name compromised by deception can still preserve a meaningful relationship. The marriage ends in death and revelation, but its emotional life persists in Rié’s search for a name and in her son’s refusal to let the father he knew disappear.