A Man

by Keiichirō Hirano

He hoped to be around. If he wasn’t, he wondered how Sota would remember his father as he was in the present. What sort of person might Kido carry on as in his son’s recollection?

It was in the midst of his reignited existential anxiety that two new worries made their presence felt: the return to cultural memory of the massacre of Koreans and the ultraright xenophobic displays of the previous year.

All it might take to stir someone up in the midst of the everyday was the voice of fake news. Overflowing with lies, they would then be capable of murdering members of the “Korean race” as soon as they felt the urge.

The problem he grappled with was that of the so-called “voluntary evacuees” who had fled areas with elevated radiation levels due to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant meltdown, even though the government had not designated them as mandatory evacuation zones.

Voluntary evacuees often ended up isolated, and Kido dealt with some of the more extreme cases.

Once she had begun to see his humanitarian tendencies this way, they became all the more difficult for her to tolerate, as Kaori no longer had any hobbies of her own. With each passing year, she found less and less that called to her in the world and had already lost nearly all interest in anything besides family.

“How did things get like this? I feel like saying those awful things would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.” “I suppose the dregs of internet language have been stirred up.”

It’s unbearable to have your identity summed up by one thing and one thing only and for other people to have control over what that is.”

Three forward and four back is the way to go. You might not think so by looking at me, but I’m a megapessimist—true pessimists are full of cheer! That’s my personal motto. Our expectations are always low, so when something just a little bit nice happens, we’re on cloud nine.”

“Everyone makes this world out to be so much better than it actually is. They just see it the way they want it to be. That’s why they blame people for their misfortunes. Meanwhile, they’re not even satisfied with their own lives.”

Nakakita had been approached by someone seeking advice about victims of the ensuing tsunami whose existence the government had not kept track of because they lacked a family register.

As per the Civil Code, a child born within three hundred days of a divorce was legally considered to be the child of the former husband. The law had become controversial of late because women, who, for example, divorced after suffering domestic violence and who had a child soon after with a new partner, sometimes refrained from submitting a notification of birth. This left some children to enter society without a family register.

As far as official records were concerned, the events of both their coming into the world and leaving it had simply not taken place—there was never even anything that temporarily existed for the word “not” to deny, with no unfolding from the beginning, and the circle of nothingness closed.

Assuming Daisuké Taniguchi was safe and sound, Kido had been imagining him living under X’s identity, having swapped family registers with him. But what if X had been unregistered? Did that mean Daisuké had become unregistered in his place?

Kido had been hopeful that Daisuké Taniguchi was still around. Now, even setting aside all speculation about the tsunami, he began to feel a sense of foreboding.

Used mainly in the beginning for policing and tax collection, the family register was expanded over a millennium later in the Edo period when it became a tool for cracking down on Christianity.

As this system presupposed attachment to land, it was rendered obsolete in the late nineteenth century, not long after the start of the Meiji period, when freedom of movement was recognized, and the first modern family register was introduced. This new family register was employed in the census for the purposes of conscription and tax collection, and the desire to avoid these led many to ditch or falsify their registers.

“Your point being that people were excluded from the spiritual body of the nation and became second-class citizens if they weren’t included in the family register.”

the government mostly conducts identity management with residence certificates these days. Once

they tie together taxes and social security with the My Number system, the family register will finally become redundant.”

it’s because of the family register system that someone like Daisuké Taniguchi would want to make a clean break from his family.” “And what about X? If he wasn’t unregistered to begin with, then I’d wager he was hiding a criminal record. And for a very serious crime.

It involved a then fifty-five-year-old man in Tokyo’s Adachi ward. Pretending to be another man aged sixty-seven, he’d illegitimately received his pension. But he hadn’t merely gone fraudulently by this other man’s name. He had traded

family registers with him upon their mutual agreement. The other man had made the swap in order to convince his fiancée, a woman in her thirties, that he had never been married before and that he was a decade younger.

What caught Kido’s attention was that the case involved a third person who served as the broker for the exchange.

The case dated to 2007, the exact year that Daisuké Taniguchi moved out of his apartment in Osaka and X appeared in Town S, and as Kido was reading the record, he began to wonder if they might not have met through this man.

“A man who went by his name has passed away. But he wasn’t Daisuké Taniguchi, and the real Taniguchi is missing. It’s just a hunch, but I thought

you might know something about their family register exchange.” Omiura gave a flick of his chin and said, “You’re talking about the second son from Ikaho Onsen?”

“It was no exchange. It’s called identity laundering.

Learning that Omiura knew Daisuké Taniguchi had been a surprise. In all likelihood, he knew something about X’s identity too. But thinking about going back to meet him invariably put Kido in an awful mood. He never wanted to speak with that man again.

But when Kido looked more carefully, he discovered that encircling the right nipple were small characters that read, “Daisuké Taniguchi” and encircling the left nipple, “Yoshihiko Sonézaki.”

in place of the anguish immediately following his death, a new kind of loneliness sometimes seeped through the depths of her body.

Now Rié was more aware of her age than ever. She compared herself to her father, who had died at only sixty-seven, and sensed her own approach to the end gaining ineluctable momentum.

Rié wasn’t sure when she had begun to conceive of Ryo’s death not as something that made him vanish in the past but as something that allowed him to wait for her in the future, his existence not receding but approaching.

the idea that her most cherished loved ones had gone to the great beyond for her sake soothed her fear of following them and gave her something to lean on in the solitary here and now.

“Then . . . what about the story Dad told me? About his home in Ikaho Onsen, and having a fight with his family, and coming here after he ran away.” Rié hesitated for a moment but decided there was no use being evasive, and looking Yuto straight in the eye, said, “That isn’t his past. It’s Daisuké Taniguchi’s.”

From his divorce mediation work, Kido knew just how common it was for disagreements around childrearing to cause deep-rooted discord between couples. But his and Kaori’s inability to have a calm discussion about such a trifling issue was unusual.

When Kido saw how Kaori treated their child, it was the first time he seriously considered divorce.

After ten years living in wedlock, their relationship was slowly coming apart, without any particular inciting incident he could point to, and Kido kept trying to think of some way that they might set it right.

In all fairness to Kaori, she too was making efforts to restrain herself and prevent their fights from escalating. She took great care not to become emotional with Kido, though in compensation, her berating of Sota would sometimes rise to a furious pitch. Never before had Kido seen her behave the way she did with him at such times, not in the whole decade they had lived together.

To make up for this failure, he consoled Sota in his room and in the bath, hugging him and letting him talk, all the while hating himself for this disingenuous evasion of his responsibility. How far he had strayed from the sort of father he wished to be.

If their falling-out had only concerned husband and wife, Kido might have accepted it. What tore him apart was the impact it was having on their son.

Perhaps “placed” isn’t right. More likely, that gesture of rebuke was a slap. And realizing this instantly, Kido left his hand where it was, gripping his son’s head in anger, in a half-unconscious attempt to conceal what he had done. Frightened, Sota stopped crying, and Kido stared at his hand.

Every time Kido encountered tragic cases of child abuse in his divorce suits, his heart went out to the children. At the same time, he tried to have some understanding for the parents who could not help their behavior due to their innate disposition and environment.

if the conditions of his life were different, he might have become a child beater. Picturing this hypothetical scenario amounted to a profound loss of faith in himself.

“If you saw me and my double, would you know which one was the real me?” “Um, what do you mean?” Sota told him about the Anpanman picture book the day care teachers had read them in which the villain, Baikinman, went around posing as Anpanman.

Even if your double looked like you on the outside, he still wouldn’t have your memories, now would he?” “Oh yeah. You’re amazing, Daddy! So if your double shows up, should I ask him about his memories too?” “Definitely.”

Kido had been putting off decorating their Christmas tree and decided to get it done before bed. So, throwing on a CD of Masabumi Kikuchi and Masahiko Togashi duets, he took out the cardboard box with the decorations.

For the first time, Kido wondered if X might have been a perfectly normal guy who simply got bored with his life and decided that he wanted a new one. As the conversation with Sota suggested, memories make people who they are. Thus, if you possessed the memories of another, wouldn’t it be possible to become them?

Kido had tried searching online for Yoshihiko Sonézaki, one of the names from Omiura’s nude manga copy, but had failed to turn up a criminal record, or, for that matter, any sign that the man existed.

something told him that X’s life had to have been innocuous enough that Daisuké Taniguchi would deem it worth trading for simply to escape his poor relationship with his family.