A Man

by Keiichirō Hirano

Kido, after finishing up some work at the Tokyo District Court, headed to Shibuya for an exhibition of art curated from the submissions of convicts on death row.

what drew him to the exhibition was a newly discovered interest in the art of convicts, kindled by his encounter with Omiura and the peculiar postcards he’d sent from prison. What if this tragicomic puzzle of a con man had been awaiting that fatal retribution? His drawings would no doubt have had a completely different character.

Kido was curious to see what sort

of art people actually in such a predicament might create in the present.

But irrespective of capitalism and mass consumer society, didn’t art in fact originally function as publicity? For example, a blazingly vibrant sunflower in a flowerpot. A horse galloping across a prairie. A life of loneliness. The tragedy of war.

Among the work of convicts who acknowledged their guilt, a few decried the brutality of capital punishment as an institution, but many were depictions of birds, flowers, cats, or any other subject the artist happened to have felt like taking up.

innocence, a surprisingly small number directly denied committing the crime. Rather than

say what they had not done, they screamed with grave urgency that they were not the sort of person that could have done it, defending not their actions but their existence. The state was, after all, proceeding toward obliterating them.

If the human personality could be carved up into parts, then perhaps they were desperately advertising, out of the pit of fear for their own death, the presence of these blameless others that would be dragged off with them to doom.

A, the manager of a karaoke bar in Kitakyushu,

and B, one of his staff, who are both hard-up for cash, cook up an insurance fraud scheme. First, the two of them are adopted by a certain financial backer in order to legally become brothers. Then, they have B take out an expensive life insurance plan, make A the recipient, and kill a homeless man in B’s place by force-feeding him alcohol. Now they’re ready for the switcheroo, and they try to fraudulently collect life insurance. But here’s the slipup. The man they killed is not even close to B in either age or height, and the police are onto them in no time.

To kill the homeless man in B’s place, they must have switched their identities . . . At this thought, Kido broke out in ticklish goose bumps around his biceps. When he made the connection to X impersonating Daisuké Taniguchi, his jaw fell open, his lips shaped into an unvoiced “Oh.”

They’re just like X’s pictures, he realized. And pulling out his cell phone, Kido searched for the photos of X’s personal effects that he had taken at Rié’s place.

The critic had just shifted to the landscape pictures. He explained that the artist was a man named Kenkichi Kobayashi who had been executed twenty years earlier. But X’s name was supposed to be Yoshihiko Sonézaki.

Why did he call me a chump in that letter? Kido wondered. Had Omiura just been trying to rile him, or had he actually been hinting at something substantial as Kido had assumed?

Before you went, ‘Wow, look how talented these death row convicts are, look at their amazing pictures,’ did you bother to consider how much talent, what dreams, how beautiful were the minds of those who were murdered? Were they given the time to draw pictures before their lives were taken? You say that the death penalty is barbaric, but don’t we all reap what we sow?

Shouldn’t you put up a sign that properly describes how horrible their crimes actually were? Even in cases of murder, it’s only, like, 0.2 percent that are sentenced to death, you know. It is beyond clemency, what these people have done!

Legally speaking, Japan’s approach to punishment is not absolute retributivism but proportional retributivism.

In penology since the advent of the modern era, corporal punishment that takes the form of ‘an eye for an eye’ has been replaced with removal of freedom. If a victim is blinded, the perpetrator does not have their eyes poked out.

Instead of such retribution, a punishment is assigned that restricts the criminal’s freedom in accordance with the severity of the crime.

The institution of the death penalty falls completely outside this principle.

since the dead victim has been deprived of all of their freedom, it follows from your reasoning that death row convicts should never be allowed to think or feel anything.” “Which exactly sums up my opinion,” said Kawamura, not using the mic. “They should be executed immediatel...

profoundly interested in an exhibit of artwork created by the surviving family of the victims. Only I think the onus is on advocates of the victims to hold it. Citizens should of course view both and make up their minds for themselves.”

Once the talk was over, Sugino began to schmooze with the guest art critics, so Kido decided to extricate himself from the crowd rushing out the door and wait in front of the landscape paintings.

As Kido went to put his phone in his pocket, his eye caught a photograph of a face on the screen and all words abandoned him. It was X.

“See this . . . ,” he said, showing his iPhone to Sugino. “Ah,” said Sugino, bringing his face closer to the display. “That’s the man who painted these, Kenkichi Kobayashi.”

He realized the photo wasn’t X, only someone who looked incredibly similar. How? Why? Suddenly he was ready to make a guess, but gobsmacked and excited, he lacked the presence of mind to grasp any of the implications.

Kenkichi Kobayashi had a son named Makoto. As the boy had taken his mother’s maiden name, Hara, when she and Kenkichi got divorced, he now went by the name Makoto Hara. It was in 1985, in a city called Yokkaichi in Mie Prefecture, that Kenkichi Kobayashi committed the crimes for which he was later executed.

Sugino mentioned that Kobayashi’s son, Makoto, had been born in 1975—the same year as Kido.

Makoto’s mother had immediately moved out of town with him. Makoto was later recorded as living in an orphanage in Maebashi. Little was known about his activities after he left.

Starting around this time, he was repeatedly reported to the police for shoplifting. In 2008, he was finally charged and given one year in prison with a three-year suspension of sentence.

When Makoto Hara was sent to prison the first time around, one of the weeklies published a feature exposé entitled “After the Crime” that used him as an example of how a convict’s offspring could turn out.

He then spent nearly a decade making ends meet as a day laborer, never staying anywhere long as rumors that he was the child of

a murderer inevitably surfaced in his workplace wherever he went. The exposé noted that, after his first conviction for shoplifting in 2006, the crime quickly became habitual.

a lawyer named Kadosaki, who was also involved in the abolition movement. Dismayed at its treatment of the son of an infamous convict, she’d taken Makoto Hara on as a client and represented him the second time he was given an actual prison term. In court, she drew attention to his early childhood trauma and history of psychiatric treatment

Makoto Hara had been locked up with Omiura.

added plausibility to a conjecture that he had been entertaining but still found too unbelievable to be true. Namely, that X was the son of Kenkichi Kobayashi. In other words, X was the real Makoto Hara, while the man formerly incarcerated for compulsive shoplifting had merely switched family registers with him via Omiura.

“The police never checked his identity? What about the photo on his ID cards, his driver’s license?” “I don’t think he has a license. He’s homeless.”

“He has a mild cognitive deficit. He blames boxing, says the brain damage took away his ability to do math, but the psychiatrist thought he was always like that.”

No matter how much you hate your past, there’s no excuse for tricking a mentally handicapped drifter into swapping registers.”

While it was understandable that X might have yearned for emancipation from the fact that he was the son of Kenkichi Kobayashi, assuming that was indeed

who he was, foisting that fact on someone else was a dubious move at best. And if that someone happened to have a slender capacity for decision-making, it was simply atrocious.

Kido suspected that he envied and admired X for being able

to discard his past and start anew. Otherwise, there was no satisfactory way to explain his interest in the man. Kido told himself that this desire, the wish to experience the life of another, was not exclusive to those who had lost all hope in the present.

Initially, Kido had dismissed Kyoichi’s insistence that X had been a dangerous criminal as delusional and only began to take it seriously after he met Omiura,

Kido wanted to speak with the shoplifter who called himself Makoto Hara and asked Kadosaki to arrange a meeting. As the man was fond of Kadosaki, he quickly agreed.

“I don’t mean to be rude but . . . is your real name Yoshihiko Sonézaki?” “I’m Makoto Hara. That’s definitely true.”

“I promise that I will never repeat what you tell me here,” said Kido, looking him straight in the eye. The man hesitated before blurting, “My name is really Shozo Tashiro.”

“That’s your real name?” he asked. “Yeah.” “And you traded it with Makoto Hara?” “Yeah. You got it. My family register, everything.”

“So you’re telling us your name is Tashiro? Not Sonézaki?”