X and Hana’s father–daughter relationship

X and Hana’s father–daughter relationship began within the family life X formed with Rié after marrying her and moving into her family home. Hana was three when X died in a logging accident, so her childhood with him was brief; later, the revelation that he was not the real Daisuké Taniguchi made the family’s history legally unstable without erasing the fact that he had been her father in life. The relationship therefore carries two truths at once: Hana was X’s daughter, and the identity under which he had lived—and under which their family was recorded—was borrowed.

Family life and early loss

After marrying Rié, X moved into her family home. Their daughter Hana was born into a household that also included Yuto, Rié’s son from her first marriage. When X died in the mountains, Yuto was twelve and Hana only three. Rié hurried to the hospital but arrived after X had died, leaving Hana with little time to know her father and the family with an abrupt absence at its center.

X’s death did not immediately bring his family in Gunma into Hana’s life. Before the accident, he and Rié had discussed the possibility that his dangerous work might lead to his death. X had specifically told her not to contact his family or associate with them if he died. Rié honored that request until the first anniversary, when she wrote to them after speaking with her mother and friends. Her immediate concern was practical and intimate: she did not know what to do about X’s ashes, which still had no grave.

That unfinished burial reflected the incompleteness of the relationship’s aftermath. Rié wondered whether she should have urged X to reconcile with his family, and his sudden death left matters unresolved. The distance between the household in which Hana had grown up and X’s estranged relatives was thus present from the beginning of her bereavement, before the truth about his name became legally consequential.

The secret behind Hana’s parentage

The family’s legal record named X as Daisuké Taniguchi, but X was not the real Daisuké. When the discrepancy was addressed, Rié’s family register still included her and “Daisuké Taniguchi,” with their legal residence recorded as her family home. Kido petitioned the Miyazaki Family Court to cancel the record of Daisuké’s removal due to death, which would show him as alive in the register and resolve the contradiction with the police missing-person report. He then sought to remove the name from Rié’s register and restore her maiden name, Takemoto, annulling the marriage on the basis of error.

The legal consequence extended directly to Hana: once the marriage was erased from Rié’s family register, Hana, X’s child, became legally illegitimate. The procedure did not undo Hana’s birth or the relationship she had lived, but it changed the public and legal terms in which that family could be recognized. The father who had raised a household with Rié had occupied another man’s identity, and the correction of that identity left his daughter bearing a consequence of the deception.

The distinction between legal status and lived attachment is especially sharp because Hana was too young to articulate the history herself. When she was nearly five, she was still known for the plump arms and legs that had earned her the nickname “the Puffy Tot”; as she grew more active at day care, that infant shape disappeared. Rié watched her change and recognized that children quickly outgrow the traits by which adults think they know them. Yet Hana’s face seemed to carry a more unsettling continuity: her eyes resembled her father’s, even as his identity remained unknown to the family. The resemblance made the missing father visible in the daughter while underscoring how little the family could securely say about the man behind the name.

Yuto’s insistence on remembering their father

The revelation and the planned restoration of Rié’s maiden name also affected Yuto, who had understood X as his father. Yuto asked to keep the surname Taniguchi even if Rié returned to Takemoto. He had already lived under several family names: the Yonedas at birth, the Takemotos after Rié’s divorce, and then the Taniguchis when he began elementary school. In middle school, he explained, friends and other students knew him as Taniguchi; repeatedly correcting them would make him feel that the name was being taken away from him.

His request was not only a matter of convenience. Yuto reminded Rié that X’s ashes remained in an urn and that she hardly spoke about him anymore. He feared that if the family stopped being Taniguchi, X’s own relatives’ rejection would be followed by the children forgetting him too. He distinguished the family’s father figures with painful clarity: without the Taniguchi name, X might cease to be his father in any meaningful sense, reduced to the husband from Rié’s second marriage, while Hana would remain his child and have a different father from Yuto’s.

Rié’s reaction to Yuto’s distress brought Hana’s position into view as well. Yuto’s wish to preserve the name grew from attachment to X, but it also exposed how the legal revision might divide the children’s shared family history. His grief concerned not just what X had been called, but the risk that the siblings would be assigned different stories about who their father was.

A father’s care carried forward

X’s relationship with Yuto offers a further measure of the family life Hana shared, even though the two children had different biological fathers. Yuto later understood that X had treated him with the care he himself had wanted from his own father. Rié affirmed that X had also been kind because he cared specifically for Yuto. The tenderness was neither merely a role imposed by marriage nor a substitute without feeling: X’s paternal attention had become part of the children’s lived family bond.

That bond continued in the small acts through which Yuto cared for the surviving household. Seeing his grandmother looking at the aquarium in the shed, he proposed goldfish and promised to look after them. Rié was moved by his thoughtfulness and remembered X’s earlier praise of Yuto as a good, considerate boy. After the losses of his brother, grandfather, and the man he had thought of as his father, Yuto watched over Hana and found ways to help his family while carrying grief largely without speaking about it. Hana’s relationship to X thus sits within a larger pattern of care that survived his death, passing through the children and shaping their attachment to one another.

Resemblance, memory, and the limits of the record

Hana’s changing appearance makes the father–daughter relationship legible as both inheritance and uncertainty. Rié saw Hana becoming more like X, especially in the eyes, but could not treat that resemblance as a secure answer to the question of identity: X’s own identity had been false, and the features inherited from him could not settle who he had been. The daughter’s face preserved a trace of the father while leaving the truth about him unresolved.

The legal annulment therefore marks a boundary between what the family register could correct and what it could not. It could restore Rié’s maiden name and classify Hana as illegitimate; it could not remove the years Hana had spent as X’s daughter, or the place he held in Yuto’s understanding of fatherhood. The relationship’s significance lies in that durable contradiction: a family formed under an assumed name, altered by legal discovery, and still held together in memory by the children’s attachment to the father they knew.