Rié's identity crisis after discovering her husband's deception

Rié’s identity crisis after discovering her husband’s deception is more than uncertainty about the name of the man she loved: it unsettles her memories, her mourning, and her sense of whose life she is living. Although she had been married to him for three years and nine months, the discovery that he was not Daisuké Taniguchi makes even their closest moments feel newly uncertain. The official correction of her family register cannot resolve the deeper question. It leaves Rié confronting both the man she cannot name and the past she had believed was hers.

The dead man and the borrowed name

Rié’s questions begin with death. The family-register records say that the person who died was Daisuké Taniguchi, but Rié knows that the man she loved was not the real Daisuké. She therefore asks herself who died—and whose death her husband had died. The discrepancy is not an abstract puzzle detached from grief: it alters the identity of the person she has lost, while the real Daisuké remains someone her husband had never been.

Kido calls Rié’s late husband X, but she refuses to adopt that label, even as a convenience. To her, assigning a person a code without his permission insults his dignity. The name also makes the conversation feel as if it concerns a stranger, and when Kido uses it, Rié finds that words slip away from her. She recognizes that the label is meant to refer to her husband, yet cannot make it stand in for the person she knew. Without his real name, she has nothing to call him as he recedes from her.

That difficulty becomes especially sharp at the family altar, where Rié kneels before her husband’s photograph and cannot find words that might make him turn around. When the children were present, she called him Papa or Father; alone with him, she called him Daisuké-kun. The familiar suffix had made his name sound intimate and almost boyish. Now its intimacy is unsettled: Daisuké was the name of a complete stranger, and Rié cannot separate the affection she gave her husband from the false identity through which she addressed him.

Intimacy made uncertain

Rié remembers that she called him Daisuké-kun most freely when they were alone and their closeness needed no explanation. In those moments, there was no one else to distinguish him from and no risk of mistaking him for another person. Yet the name spoken in the greatest intimacy was precisely the name of someone else. Rié is left imagining that her affection, which had seemed to belong wholly to her husband, may have enveloped him through the name of a man he was not.

The deception reaches beyond the name. Her husband had told Rié the story of the man whose identity he bore, and she had felt deep sympathy for the life that story described. Rié had once filled the silence about her husband’s childhood with imagined scenes: a quiet boy finding a secluded place at lunch, content to be outside the class’s social center, and remembered vividly by former classmates despite having been inconspicuous at the time. The life she had pictured was itself shaped by the story her husband told her. The discovery therefore unsettles not only what he said about himself, but also the imaginative understanding through which Rié had tried to know him.

The contradiction is harder to contain because her experience of the marriage had been so happy. Her husband remained gentle and generous; he spoke little, kept a mild expression, and never raised his voice to Rié or the children. Rié contrasts him with her first husband, who became irritable after Yuto’s birth and overlooked the changes that eventually afflicted Ryo. The kindness and steadiness Rié remembers are real features of their shared life, but they do not tell her who her husband was before she met him—or why he chose to live under another man’s name.

A marriage that stops in retrospect

Rié remembers the three years and nine months of married life as the happiest period she had known. Looking back after her husband’s abrupt death, however, those memories seem to spin like a top that suddenly falls and stops. While the relationship was continuing, its contradictions could remain in motion without coming into focus. Rié imagines that, had he lived, she might never have noticed the inconsistencies in his story, just as dirt on a spinning top can resemble a perfect circle.

Now the past no longer turns smoothly. The years of marriage have left their mark throughout Rié’s body, making it frightening to imagine that she might discover within herself a face that matches the barren label X. The fear does not amount to a simple rejection of their life together. Instead, she is caught between what she experienced—the husband who loved and cared for his family—and the possibility that the false identity concealed a stranger whose history she never knew.

Rié wants to believe that her husband had a good reason for deceiving her, but she cannot understand why he did not tell her. They had known each other for four and a half years before his death, trusted one another, and had opportunities for him to speak. Facing his photograph, she keeps wishing for a name by which she can call him. Her question about whether a performance of sincerity can itself become the ultimate deception captures the bind: the love she received may have been sincere, yet it was lived inside a lie that denied her the truth needed to understand whom she loved.

Legal correction and the question of self

Five months after the petitions were filed, around the first week of August, the court approved both the petition to annul Daisuké Taniguchi’s death and the petition to restore Rié’s maiden name to her family register. DNA testing had established that her husband was not the real Daisuké. The marriage was consequently erased from the official records: Rié was no longer legally a widow, and the corrected record showed that she had been married only once.

But legal correction does not return Rié to an uncomplicated past. She recognizes that the error was not merely a bureaucratic mistake. She had believed she married a man named Daisuké Taniguchi, publicly announced that marriage, and notified the government of his death without knowing what the real Daisuké was doing or where he was. That recognition brings a bewildering, harrowing sadness and leaves her without a concrete sense of whose life she herself is leading.

The crisis thus persists after the record is set right. The law can undo the false marriage and correct Rié’s status, but it cannot erase the years she lived with her husband or furnish the name she needs in order to mourn him. Her memories remain hers, even as their account of the past has been exposed as false. Rié is left trying to hold together an intimate life she remembers as true and a personal history whose central identity was not.