The accident after Makoto Hara’s professional boxing debut

The accident after Makoto Hara’s professional boxing debut ended the dream that had carried him through an unsettled childhood and years at a boxing club. In Kido’s account to Kaori, it marks a decisive reversal in Hara’s trajectory, preceding the exchange of family registers and the brief family life that followed.

Background and the Boxing Dream

Kido tells Hara’s story in sequence, beginning with his father, Kenkichi Kobayashi, and the murders Kobayashi committed. He then describes Hara’s own childhood: he was bullied, abandoned by his mother, and left in an orphanage. Boxing offered a direction beyond those early hardships. Hara spent time at a boxing club and pursued a dream that reached the professional stage.

The Accident and Its Consequence

The accident came after Hara’s professional debut. Kido describes it as the event that caused Hara’s boxing dream to collapse; the account provides no further details about how the accident occurred or what physical effects it had. Its importance lies in the abrupt contrast between the achievement of a professional debut and the loss of the future Hara had been working toward.

Place in Hara’s Later Life

In the story Kido tells Kaori, the end of Hara’s boxing ambition is followed by his trading family registers with another man. Hara then married a woman who had lost a child, began a family with her, experienced a short period of happiness, and later died in a logging accident. The sequence places the boxing accident among several sharp reversals in Hara’s life, without suggesting that it directly caused the later identity exchange or his death.

How the Event Is Recounted

The accident reaches Kaori not as a scene witnessed by the reader but as part of Kido’s retrospective account of Hara. Kaori initially appears more interested in studying Kido’s enthusiasm than in following his story. When he reaches the family-register exchange, she asks whether such a thing really happens; after hearing the account through Hara’s death, she calls the tale tragic and incredible and asks what it has to do with Kido. The accident therefore sits within an intimate act of explanation: Kido uses Hara’s life to approach a personal subject he has not yet stated directly.