Yuan Cheng's multiple household registration exchanges

Makoto Hara’s multiple family-register exchanges transformed identity from a private name into an administratively recognized life. By moving through successive registers, he eventually lived as Daisuké Taniguchi and married Rié in Town S; the same process left the real Daisuké’s fate unresolved and showed how official paperwork could certify an impostor while concealing the person displaced by him.

The Exchange Sequence

Kido’s reconstruction places Hara’s first exchange before his adoption of the Daisuké Taniguchi identity. Drawing on a clue from Omiura, he inferred that Hara had first taken the name Yoshihiko Sonézaki. Hara then encountered Daisuké and made another exchange—or, Kido allowed, may have taken Daisuké’s register without consent. Under the resulting identity, Hara went to Town S and met Rié. The sequence is presented as an inference rather than a fully verified account, but it gives Kido a way to understand how Hara’s identity changed more than once.

Kido revised that reconstruction as he investigated a separate exchange involving a drifter who called himself Makoto Hara. He had worried that Hara personally passed an unwanted register to the man, whose testimony would have meant that a person with a mental disability was made to assume the identity of the son of a notorious murderer. But the drifter’s account did not establish that he had met the real Hara; he may have encountered only someone using Hara’s name. Kido therefore concluded that Hara’s first exchange was probably with a different man, who later passed Hara’s identity on to the drifter.

In the revised version, Hara first became Yoshihiko Sonézaki, then exchanged that register for Daisuké Taniguchi’s and went to Town S. If the reconstruction was right, the real Daisuké took the name Yoshihiko Sonézaki. Kido could not confirm that final step, however: Daisuké might have exchanged identities again, and Kido could not establish whether he was still alive. The chain therefore ends not with a settled identification but with an unresolved possibility about the man displaced by Hara.

An Official Life

As “Daisuké Taniguchi,” Hara’s identity was not merely a name he used socially. Officials verified it when they updated the family register after receiving his marriage notification and again after his reported death. He drove using a license, received medical care with a health-insurance card, and made pension contributions punctually. Public records supported the same identity, and his account of growing up in Gunma showed no apparent discrepancies. The deception was unusually difficult to detect because its records and ordinary transactions all reinforced one another.

The contradiction emerged through personal recognition. The man recorded as Daisuké did not look like the real Daisuké, and Daisuké’s brother, Kyoichi, identified the difference after seeing a photograph. Hara’s legal identity had passed through institutions, but it failed the test of a family member who knew the person behind the name. The exchange thus separated administrative proof from personal recognition without making either irrelevant: official records sustained Hara’s life as Daisuké, while Kyoichi’s recognition exposed that the name belonged to someone else.

After Hara’s death, the records themselves created a further legal problem. Rié’s family register listed her and “Daisuké Taniguchi” at her family home, and the death entry made the real Daisuké appear deceased. Kido petitioned the Miyazaki Family Court first to cancel that removal, so the records would show Daisuké alive and police would no longer be left with a missing-person report for someone officially considered dead. He also sought to remove Daisuké’s name from Rié’s register and restore her maiden name, Takemoto, annulling the marriage on the ground of error. That correction would erase the second marriage from her register and make Hana, Rié’s child with Hara, legally illegitimate. The court required Rié to appear and requested DNA evidence; Kido gathered hair, nail clippings, an electric razor, and a toothbrush from Hara’s belongings for testing.

Registers, Recognition, and Exclusion

The register system gives the exchanges their force because it does more than record an identity after the fact. In the novel’s account, Japanese family registers developed from an imperial administrative system used for policing and taxation, and expanded in the Edo period to include religious affiliation as well as information such as birth, marriage, adoption, address, occupation, and death. Since the system tied people to land, freedom of movement in the Meiji period made that arrangement obsolete; the modern register then served census, conscription, and tax purposes. Across these changes, people who were itinerant, unreported, or otherwise absent from the records remained difficult to account for.

Kido and his colleague Nakakita connect this history to the three-hundred-day rule: a child born within three hundred days of a divorce was legally presumed to be the former husband’s child. Women who divorced after domestic violence and soon had a child with a new partner might avoid registering the birth, leaving the child without a family register. Such children could meet the conditions for Japanese citizenship and still remain unknown to the state. The discussion makes the register’s absence as consequential as its falsification: one can be assigned the wrong life by an entry, or left without an entry through which one’s life can be officially recognized.

The same distinction shapes Kido’s fear about the real Daisuké. After learning that tsunami victims without registers could escape government accounting, he wondered whether Hara had been unregistered and whether Daisuké had taken on an identity absent from public records. If Daisuké had been murdered, Kido reasoned, the authorities might not recognize the crime; a discovered body could be treated as unidentified. If the tsunami had taken him, physical evidence might also have disappeared, making an already uncertain search harder. This is a hypothesis, not a confirmed account of Daisuké’s fate, but it shows how a register exchange can obscure not only who someone is but whether the state can register that they existed.

Nakakita notes that residence certificates had largely taken over identity management and that linking taxation and social security through the My Number system could make the family register redundant. Kido observes that integrated administration might also make identity trading easier; Nakakita replies that biometric management would make escape from the system nearly impossible. Their exchange leaves the central tension intact: more comprehensive identification may close opportunities for substitution, but the history of missing and excluded people shows that administrative completeness is not the same as universal recognition.

Narrative Significance

The exchanges turn the question of identity into a problem of competing evidence. A register, a license, insurance, pension payments, a family photograph, a brother’s recognition, and biological samples each offer different ways to establish who a person is. In Hara’s case, the official record was coherent enough to sustain a marriage and a public life, yet Kyoichi’s recognition revealed its false premise; after Hara died, correcting that record threatened to alter Rié’s legal status and Hana’s legitimacy.

Kido’s account remains provisional where the evidence runs out. He can reconstruct Hara’s likely movement from Yoshihiko Sonézaki to Daisuké Taniguchi and explain why the real Daisuké might have taken the first name in return, but he cannot prove that the exchange happened as imagined or discover whether Daisuké survived. That uncertainty is not a loose end that paperwork can automatically repair. The story’s repeated exchanges make official identity appear both powerful and fragile: a register can authorize a life, erase a marriage, or render a missing person almost impossible to find, but it cannot by itself settle the human question of who lived under the name.