X’s landscape sketches

X’s landscape sketches are a visual clue that helps Kido connect X to the executed artist Kenkichi Kobayashi and reconsider the identity exchange at the center of his investigation. Their significance lies in a telling distinction: the scenes are geographically different, yet the style is identical, making the drawings evidence of a connection rather than simple copies of the same views.

Discovery at the Exhibition

Kido notices the resemblance while looking at photographs of X’s personal effects on his phone. The sketches there match landscapes displayed beside B’s nude illustrations at an exhibition. A critic identifies the landscape artist as Kenkichi Kobayashi, who was executed twenty years earlier; X, by contrast, was supposed to be Yoshihiko Sonézaki. The mismatch between the attribution and X’s supposed name turns a stylistic resemblance into a question about who X really was.

From Resemblance to Suspicion

The drawings make Kido connect the exhibition’s discussion of exchanged identities with X’s impersonation of Daisuké Taniguchi. But the sketches do not, by themselves, establish the full explanation. Kido recognizes that his certainty about the exchange still rests on Omiura’s enigmatic postcard, whose markings associate the names Daisuké Taniguchi and Yoshihiko Sonézaki. The landscapes therefore work as a compelling clue, not conclusive proof: they intensify Kido’s realization while leaving him to test how the separate pieces fit.

A Clue Reworked into a Case

After hearing Kosuge and Yanagisawa recount Makoto Hara’s story, Kido returns home and writes it down from memory, consulting his hurried notes as he reorganizes the information collected during a year of investigation. He intends at last to report his findings to Rié. In that act of reconstruction, the sketches’ resemblance belongs to a larger process: scattered traces, including visual evidence, must be brought into a coherent account of Hara’s life and assumed identity.

Significance

The difference between the landscapes’ locations and their shared style makes the sketches especially suggestive. They do not simply reproduce one another’s subject matter; they carry an identifiable mark across different scenes. For Kido, that mark offers a way to recognize a person through work associated with another name, while also exposing the limits of recognition: resemblance can direct an investigation, but it cannot alone settle the truth.