X's assumed identity as Daisuké Taniguchi

X's assumed identity as Daisuké Taniguchi is the central deception that turns an intimate family history into a problem of legal fact, personal memory, and grief. X does not simply borrow a name: he lives as the real Daisuké, marries Rié, fathers children with her, and leaves a public record that officials accept as authentic. The exposure of that identity makes the marriage subject to annulment and leaves Rié with a more intimate question than who committed fraud: whose life, and whose death, was she sharing?

Identity and the Evidence of the Family Album

For years, the man in Rié’s home is understood as Daisuké Taniguchi. The deception is brought into view when Kyoichi Taniguchi, the real Daisuké’s brother, sees photographs from the family album. At first he reacts with angry disbelief to the suggestion that someone had been using his brother’s name. The distinction, he insists, is not that Daisuké has changed since youth: the man in the pictures is someone else entirely.

The album makes that conclusion difficult to dismiss as a fleeting impression. Assembled by Daisuké from printouts of his digital photographs, it shows the man who claimed the name alongside Rié, Yuto, and Hana. On its last page is an older photograph of Kyoichi with his parents at the family home. Kyoichi remembers why Daisuké is not in the picture: Daisuké was the one taking it. The image gives Kyoichi a concrete point of comparison, turning his initial uncertainty into recognition that the man in Rié’s photographs was not his brother.

Kyoichi tells Rié that the man was impersonating Daisuké, while admitting that he has only just seen the photographs himself. He cannot tell her who the impersonator was or why he did it; his immediate suggestion is to go to the police. The disclosure therefore establishes the fraud without resolving the identity of the person behind it. For Rié and her mother, that gap is frightening: the evidence does not make the man in their home familiar again, but calls into question who he had been all along.

A False Identity Made Official

The deception is especially difficult to explain because the name was not invented. Daisuké Taniguchi existed as a real person, with a family register and an older brother who could recognize that X was not him. Kido initially finds the account perplexing. Concealing one’s identity under a false name is familiar enough to him, including in light of his own experience as a third-generation Zainichi person whose family had settled in Japan before the end of World War II. What troubles him is the inversion: someone has not hidden behind a fictional identity, but taken the identity of a living man.

Nor does the impersonation remain a private performance. Officials verify the identity when the marriage notification updates the family register and again when a death notification is filed. X uses a driver’s license and health-insurance card under Daisuké’s name, makes his pension contributions, and gives an account of a childhood in Gunma that appears to contain no discrepancies. Public records consequently affirm the same identity that Kyoichi rejects when he sees the photographs. The conflict is not simply between a convincing lie and a suspicious family; it is between bureaucratic confirmation and personal recognition.

That contrast gives the assumed identity its reach. X’s name is accepted as a legal person’s name across ordinary transactions and the decisive records of marriage and death, while his appearance fails the real Daisuké’s brother’s test. The official version of events can therefore register X as alive, married, and then dead under Daisuké’s identity, even though the actual Daisuké remains a separate person. The more complete the public record becomes, the more consequential the substitution is for the people whose lives it governs.

Marriage, Children, and Legal Consequences

X’s impersonation shapes a household, not just a record. He lives in matrimony with Rié and fathers a child with her; the family photographs preserve him in the roles of husband and father beside Rié, Yuto, and Hana. The revelation does not erase the shared life that the pictures document, but it changes the legal name under which that life was recognized. Rié’s second marriage is now treated as having been made under an error about her husband’s identity.

Kido asks the Miyazaki Family Court to make two connected revisions to the family register. First, he seeks to cancel the removal of “Daisuké Taniguchi” following the death notification, so that the register will show the real Daisuké as alive rather than leave the police with a missing-person report for someone officially recorded as dead. Second, he asks the court to remove “Daisuké Taniguchi” from Rié’s register and restore her maiden name, Takemoto. The intended result is to annul the marriage on the basis of error and erase the second marriage from her register.

That correction carries a further consequence for Hana: after the marriage is annulled, she will be legally illegitimate. The court asks Rié to appear in person and requests a DNA test to establish that X was not Daisuké. To obtain evidence, Kido gathers hair from X’s clothes, nail clippings, his electric razor, and his toothbrush. Those ordinary personal effects become evidence in a case where photographs, family testimony, and official documents each tell different versions of who X was.

Death, Naming, and the Limits of Substitution

For Rié, the name X is not a neutral convenience. Kido uses it to refer to her late husband, but Rié refuses to adopt the label, feeling that calling a person by a code chosen without permission violates his dignity. When Kido says X, she can lose the thread of the conversation: the label sounds as though they are discussing a stranger, even though she understands that it is supposed to refer to her husband. Without his real name, she cannot find a stable way to call him back as he recedes from her.

The problem of naming becomes inseparable from death. After Ryo’s death, Rié asks herself who, according to the family-register records, has died: the man registered as Daisuké Taniguchi, or the husband she knew under that name. She reasons that the real Daisuké should have had a death reserved for him alone, and wonders whose death X had died. Her question does not undo the impersonation or resolve the man’s unknown identity. It exposes what the paperwork cannot settle: a registered death belongs to one person in law, while grief attaches to the person who actually shared a life with the bereaved.

The false identity thus produces consequences that pull in opposite directions. The law must disentangle X from the real Daisuké, restore the correct register, and determine the status of the marriage and child. Rié, meanwhile, cannot simply exchange the man she loved for a corrected name or a legal category. The family album preserves a life that was genuinely lived together; the register recasts it as a marriage formed in error. Between those records, X’s assumed identity remains both an actionable deception and the name under which an irrecoverable relationship took place.