Mutsuo Koshikawa's portrait

Mutsuo Koshikawa's portrait is the police sketch that turns a missing man's face into a traceable identity. Presented to Yasuyo Miyamoto alongside four other likenesses, it allows her to recognize Koshikawa as the man she knew in Sendai as Shunichi Watabe. The portrait matters because it conveys more than facial resemblance: Miyamoto responds to the guarded quality she remembers in Watabe, and that recognition helps connect two names and two investigations.

The sketch as an investigative lead

After Koshikawa disappeared from his apartment, investigators found no photographs, identification, or other personal papers that could establish who he was. His claimed previous address in Maebashi proved unhelpful, and the police had reason to suspect that his identity had been deliberately obscured. The sketch therefore became an unusually important clue: it was the only likeness investigators had to show people who might have known him.

The portrait was drawn by forensic sketch artists at Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, using interviews with people who had seen Koshikawa. In Tokyo, Sakagami held it up while trying to identify similar-looking faces, but voiced uncertainty about how accurately forensic sketches represented their subjects. Kobayashi rejected that complaint as unproductive: whatever its limitations, the drawing was the investigators’ only lead. The scene establishes both the portrait’s provisional character and its practical force. It was not documentary proof by itself, but it gave witnesses something concrete to recognize or refuse.

Miyamoto’s recognition

To test whether the sketch could identify the man Miyamoto had known, Shuhei Matsumiya showed her five likenesses of different men. He shuffled and turned them face down so that he would not know their order, reducing the chance that his own expectations would influence the presentation. Miyamoto’s attention shifted when the fourth picture appeared; after looking briefly at the fifth, she returned her eyes to the fourth. She then selected it without hesitation as the image that looked like Watabe.

Matsumiya asked whether she had chosen the picture merely because she felt obliged to pick one, or because it genuinely resembled Watabe. Miyamoto affirmed the latter. She imagined the man she had known as Watabe at an older age and identified his slightly downturned eyes and relatively large nose as distinctive features. But her recognition did not stop at visible particulars: she also associated the sketch with someone who kept his emotions bottled up. The portrait had prompted a memory of character as well as a judgment about a face.

That response was precisely what the investigators needed. The fourth sketch was Koshikawa’s likeness, and Miyamoto’s recognition established that the missing Tokyo tenant had once lived in Sendai under the name Shunichi Watabe. When she asked whether they had found him, Matsumiya confirmed that they had—and told her that Watabe had been murdered the previous month. The portrait thus made a former identity recoverable, while the answer attached to that identity was death.

Why a drawing could prompt memory

The investigation treats the sketch’s incompleteness as a potential strength rather than simply a defect. Japanese police had stopped using facial-composite systems because their excessive detail could fail to express less tangible impressions of a person. An artist’s sketch, based on witness testimony, left room for those impressions to enter the act of recognition. Miyamoto’s response illustrates the distinction: the drawing provided facial cues, but her identification also depended on an emotional quality she remembered from the man himself.

The portrait is consequently neither a neutral photograph nor a conclusive forensic identification. Its evidentiary force comes through a witness’s encounter with it: first a spontaneous return of attention to one image, then a verbal account linking its features and expressive impression to Watabe. That recognition was persuasive enough to send the investigation back with the name connecting him to Koshikawa, but the police still sought corroboration rather than treating resemblance as the final word.

Corroboration and the larger identity puzzle

The portrait’s identification was later supported by fingerprints. Prints recovered from a train timetable matched those found in Koshikawa’s apartment, providing objective evidence that Koshikawa and the man who had called himself Watabe were the same person. The number and placement of the prints indicated that Watabe, rather than Kyoichiro Kaga’s mother, had made the most use of the timetable. This separate evidence strengthened the identity link first opened by Miyamoto’s response to the sketch.

The portrait also belongs to a wider investigation into concealed identity and a false death. Kaga deduced that Watabe was likely Hiromi Asai’s father, Tadao Asai, who had been believed to have died by suicide. The supposed death lacked the expected official documentation, and an old newspaper account described a body identified through fingerprints on luggage and visual recognition by Tadao’s daughter. In a recovered account of the earlier deception, Tadao explained that he had arranged for another man’s fingerprints to be placed on his belongings so that the man could be mistaken for him. These facts broaden the portrait’s significance: recognizing Watabe did not merely identify a murdered tenant but helped reopen the question of who had died in the earlier substitution. The investigators then sought DNA evidence to test whether Hiromi was Koshikawa, also known as Watabe’s, daughter.

As an object in the investigation, the portrait occupies the space between likeness and identity. A drawing generated from witnesses’ recollections cannot, on its own, settle who a person is; here, however, it gives a witness a route back to a name, a relationship, and a past. Miyamoto sees in its face both particular features and a contained emotional presence. That response turns the sketch from a search aid into the first human recognition in a chain of evidence that would ultimately challenge a presumed death and expose the extent of a life lived under another name.