Shibuya becomes the setting for Kido’s decisive breakthrough: at an exhibition of art made by people on death row, he recognizes that X’s landscape sketches match those of Kenkichi Kobayashi, an executed murderer. The city’s gallery brings together clues that had seemed unrelated and redirects Kido’s investigation toward X’s real identity.

Setting and occasion

Three days before Christmas, after finishing work at the Tokyo District Court, Kido heads to Shibuya to attend an exhibition of art submitted by death-row inmates. He learned about it from Sugino, a lawyer friend involved in efforts to abolish capital punishment. Kido opposes the death penalty, but his immediate reason for going is more personal: his encounter with Omiura and the unusual postcards Omiura sent from prison had made him curious about what prisoners facing execution create.

Snow falls as Kido walks from Shibuya Station to a small gallery beside the Tokyu Department Store. The exhibition is on the sixth floor of a building filled with bars and restaurants. Despite the weather, the event space is crowded, and Kido leaves his coat at the back, intending to slip out early in case his train home is delayed.

The exhibition and Kido’s attention

The works prompt Kido to consider how some artists use pictures to leave evidence of themselves beyond the bodies that will be destroyed by execution. This interest grows from his earlier attention to Omiura’s prison postcards: the exhibition is not simply an encounter with art in the abstract, but a place where he looks for a connection between the inmate’s work and the clues Omiura left him.

One display pairs political slogans with nude illustrations resembling images on a bordello flyer. Their composition and poses remind Kido of Omiura’s drawings. He realizes that Omiura’s pictures were imitations of the exhibited work, and notices that the display also contains a hand-copied Heart Sutra, a text Omiura had asked him to obtain. The details make Kido reconsider whether Omiura had been trying to signal the source of his drawings, though Kido’s suspicion at this point remains an inference rather than an established explanation.

The identity clue

The decisive turn comes during the accompanying talk. As the speaker discusses an insurance-fraud murder involving switched identities, Kido recognizes a parallel with X’s impersonation of Daisuké Taniguchi. Looking again at the framed illustrations, he shifts his attention to the landscapes beside them and recalls seeing similar pictures before.

Kido takes out his phone and searches the photographs he had made of X’s personal effects at Rié’s home. He finds X’s sketches: although they depict geographically different landscapes, their style matches the exhibited work. The speaker identifies the artist as Kenkichi Kobayashi, who was executed twenty years earlier. Since X was believed to be Yoshihiko Sonézaki, the match creates a contradiction that points beyond the name X had used.

Significance

Shibuya is the site where two strands of Kido’s inquiry converge: Omiura’s prison drawings and X’s landscape sketches. The exhibition turns Kido’s interest in inmate art into an investigative method, allowing visual style to serve as evidence when names and official identities have become unreliable. The discovery reopens Kido’s fading interest in the case and leads him toward the truth about X’s identity.