X Corporation's Family Album

X’s family album is both a record of an intimate household and the object that first makes its central deception legible to Kyoichi. Assembled from printouts of X’s digital photographs, it shows the man who lived as Daisuké alongside Rié, Yuto, and Hana; its final page, however, contains a family image Kyoichi remembers taking himself. The album turns a domestic keepsake into evidence: the photographs preserve the family life X shared with Rié while revealing that he was not her husband’s brother.

Making a Family Record

The album was made from X’s digital photographs, printed and arranged page by page. It documented the man who claimed to be Daisuké in the company of Rié and the children, making visible the shared life that had formed within the household. Rié brought the album to Kyoichi when he asked to see a photograph, and he sat on a floor cushion to examine it. The request initially concerned paperwork and family records, but the album gave Kyoichi something more direct to inspect: a sequence of images in which the supposed Daisuké appeared as part of the family.

Its pages were not simply a collection of portraits. In the final image, Kyoichi saw himself with his parents at the family home. He knew why his brother was absent: he had taken the photograph. The remembered circumstance of the picture supplied a point of comparison unavailable from the other pages. Though the album presented X’s domestic life as continuous and familiar, this earlier image connected it to Kyoichi’s own memory and exposed a discontinuity in the identity being claimed.

The Recognition

Kyoichi’s response changed as he turned through the album. From its first page he muttered in surprise, craning over the photographs, then laughed in a way Rié found insulting and unsettling. Her concern shifted toward the visitor himself: she became less doubtful of Daisuké than uneasy about who this man in her house was supposed to be, and her mother came to take her arm. The album’s discovery therefore unfolds alongside a change in the room’s atmosphere, as Kyoichi’s confusion makes Rié’s uncertainty newly consequential.

When he reached the final page and recognized the old photograph, Kyoichi’s eyes widened. He raised his head toward Rié, his mouth twitching, then looked away before explaining the conclusion he had reached: the man in the family photographs was not his brother, and someone had impersonated Daisuké. Kyoichi did not claim to know who the impostor really was; he said he had seen the man’s photograph for the first time. His immediate proposal was to go to the police, since the situation appeared to him to be a possible scam.

Evidence and Its Limits

The album establishes the falsehood of X’s claimed identity through the contrast between its family photographs and Kyoichi’s independent memory. It does not, by itself, identify the impostor or explain how the deception began. That distinction matters: the images make a decisive claim about who the man was not, while leaving the deeper history to be uncovered elsewhere. The object is persuasive because it combines repeated photographs of X inhabiting the family role with a final image whose circumstances Kyoichi can personally verify.

Later, when Kido met Rié for an extended conversation, she described how she and X had first met and what kind of person she had believed him to be. As she gathered X’s belongings, Kido studied the drawings in his sketchbooks and photographed them, as he did other personal effects, for possible use in the investigation. The album belongs to this wider process of reading personal objects for evidence, but its particular force lies in the way it joins affection to proof: X had kept a record of life with Rié and the children, and that same record allowed Kyoichi to recognize the imposture. In the novel’s treatment of identity and family memory, the album preserves a real domestic bond without making the identity under which it was formed true.