X died in a logging accident and was exposed as a fraud

The death of the man Rié knew as Daisuké Taniguchi—and the subsequent discovery that he had been impersonating Daisuké—ruptures the story’s apparently settled account of marriage and bereavement. The man had built a family with Rié and died in the forest at thirty-nine; only after his death does his brother identify him as someone else, making the loss both real and radically uncertain.

The Worker and the Accident

The man arrived in Town S at thirty-five, seeking a new career in forestry despite having no experience in the industry. Ito Lumber hired him, and he worked there for four years. He was reticent and spoke little with his coworkers, leaving Rié and her family as the only townspeople who knew much of his past. His relative isolation might have seemed unsurprising in a town receiving migrants with difficult histories, but his marriage to a well-known local made him an object of curiosity. Rié’s reputation as sensible and trustworthy reassured the community that she had examined him carefully; questions about his past consequently subsided.

His death came while he was felling a cryptomeria tree, which crushed him. Rié rushed to the hospital when she received the news, but he was already dead. Their children, Yuto and Hana, were twelve and three. The abruptness of the accident left practical and emotional matters unresolved, and the fact that the victim’s identity was not what Rié believed makes the death’s aftermath more than a conventional story of a widow left to grieve.

The work that caused the death belongs to a broader, precarious industry. Ito Lumber’s principal business was logging national forests under purchased rights; government subsidies and competition from imported materials shaped the market, while biomass generators had made timber saleable and kept business in reasonable condition. Ito also described illegal crews exploiting uncertainty over ownership: as inherited mountain land changed hands and claims multiplied, some crews bought small plots beside disputed land and cut trees whose ownership could not be established. Against this background of tangled property rights, labor risk, and commercial pressure, the accident is not an isolated image of nature’s danger but a death within an industry whose work and land tenure are difficult to separate.

A Family Built Around an Unknown Past

Before the accident, the man had asked Rié not to contact or associate with his family in Gunma, even if he died. Rié honored that request until the first anniversary of his death. After speaking with her mother and friends, she wrote to his relatives chiefly to ask what should be done about his grave: she still had nowhere to entomb his ashes. She also wondered whether she ought to have pressed him to reconcile with his family. His death had come too suddenly, she felt, leaving too much unfinished.

After their marriage, he had moved into Rié’s family home. Their life there had the visible forms of an ordinary family: he appeared in photographs beside Rié, Yuto, and Hana, and he assembled an album from printouts of his digital pictures. Those images later become evidence against the identity he had inhabited. The family album does not merely preserve a domestic past; it places the impersonator inside that past, where the people closest to him cannot distinguish the assumed name from the man.

Recognition at the Buddhist Altar

Kyoichi’s visit to Rié’s home to pay respects brings the concealed identity into view. Rié leads him into the Buddhist altar room, where he kneels before the memorial and studies the photograph of the deceased. When he sees the man’s face, he says that it is not Daisuké. At first Rié wonders whether he means that her husband looked different when young. Kyoichi makes clear that he is not describing a change in appearance: the person in the photograph is someone else entirely.

The family album makes the recognition harder to dismiss. Kyoichi studies page after page of the supposed Daisuké with Rié and the children, then reaches an old photograph of himself with his parents at the family home. He remembers why his brother is absent: Daisuké had taken the picture. The image supplies a concrete point of comparison between the living family history Kyoichi remembers and the man who later entered Rié’s household under his brother’s name.

Kyoichi tells Rié that someone impersonated Daisuké. She asks who the man really was, but Kyoichi cannot identify him; he has only just seen his photograph. He suggests going to the police and suspects a scam, while Rié and her mother are left confronting the possibility that their husband and son’s father was a stranger. The discovery does not undo the marriage or the children’s memories, but it changes what those memories can mean: every shared photograph now records both a family life and an undisclosed deception.

Forestry, Memory, and the Limits of Explanation

Years later, while handling the estate, Kido becomes interested in forestry and visits Ito Lumber. He knows that the man in Town S was remembered locally as Daisuké, even though Kido himself has come to think of him as Hara. The difference between the name attached to the man in town and the identity Kido privately uses underscores how the impersonation survives in different forms: in public memory, in legal and family affairs, and in the investigator’s own effort to understand the dead man.

Ito recalls the death with continuing guilt. He prays at the altar every morning and says that he had not seen a major accident since taking over the company from his father. The fatal job was the one time he accepted a site with poor conditions, for a client he felt unable to refuse. Forestry accidents, he explains, are common: the hazards include logging itself, machinery slipping from cliffs, snakes, and wasps. His account gives the death a specific workplace circumstance without making the victim’s fate seem inevitable or resolving the responsibility surrounding the job.

At the logging site, the forest’s timescale comes into focus. Ito estimates that trees are cut at around fifty years old, then used as building materials that may last another fifty years. He asks workers to think of a tree as having a hundred-year life: fifty years on the mountain and fifty among people. The man’s death interrupts that long passage from forest to human use. The tree he felled became the immediate instrument of his death, while the work that brought him to the mountain belonged to an industry organized around extracting timber from landscapes whose ownership, value, and risks were already contested.

The episode’s force lies in the double certainty it preserves. The man really did die, and his death really did leave Rié with children, ashes without a resting place, and unfinished questions. Yet the name under which he lived was false. The posthumous recognition does not replace one biography with a complete, secure alternative; it exposes the distance between the family’s experience of him and the identity he claimed, leaving the meaning of their shared life suspended between genuine attachment and impersonation.