A Man

by Keiichirō Hirano

Kido had the sense he wasn’t lying. He took out a photo of X.

It’s not him,” Tashiro declared, leaving no room for equivocation, as though his self-respect depended on it. “I don’t know this guy!”

Tashiro told them that, after graduating from high school, he had moved from job to job. He never lasted long because people would always call him terrible names like “moron” and “waste of space,”

Kido wrote. “Now I finally understand what you were trying to convey with those postcards.” A reply came from Omiura immediately. It was a letter unaccompanied by any illustration. He would be glad to have Kido visit whenever he liked.

“The real Makoto Hara had no compunctions about dumping his past on him?” Hearing this, Omiura sucked his cheeks in with surprise and gave Kido a sly smile. “You still don’t understand a thing, do you, sensei?”

“How do you even know my name is Norio Omiura? Is it because I look like a ‘Norio Omiura’?” Speechless, Kido could only return his gaze. “It’s the same with tattoo artists. They don’t just tattoo other people. First, they tattoo themselves. With all the family registers being flipped, why would you think I was an exception? Moron.”

“Listen, Korean lawyer. I feel sorry for you, so I’m going to let you in on one

thing. The man you’re trying so hard to figure out is just a boring schmuck. You seem to have some weird expectations about him, but the children of killers are nothing much.

Ever since Kido had learned of the boxing club Makoto Hara had belonged to, his curiosity had been piqued. So in the new year, once the busy period at work had settled, he took the train to Kita-Senju in the northeastern corner of Tokyo for a visit.

Kido briefly rehashed the series of events that had led up to their meeting, which he had already described by email, and showed them a picture of X. “Is this man Makoto Hara?” he asked. Both Kosuge and Yanagisawa took one glance at it and nodded. “That’s Makoto alright,” said Kosuge.

Kosuge showed Kido a photo of Makoto Hara, wearing red boxing gloves and taking a fighting pose. Although he had been much leaner back then, there was no mistaking that it was X. I’ve finally done it, thought Kido as he studied the image, speechless for some time.

His intuition at the convict art exhibition that X was the son of Kenkichi Kobayashi seemed to have presaged this moment.

“When did he start coming to this club, approximately?” “The spring of ’95,” said Kosuge. “I remember it well because it was after the Kobe earthquake and the Aum terrorist attack.” “Oh . . .” Kido recalled his horror when, only a few short months after the disaster in Kobe, he had seen the news of the Aum Shinrikyo cult releasing sarin gas in the Tokyo subways.

Makoto never said a word about himself to anyone,” Kosuge hurried to explain when he saw Kido looking perplexed. “You gotta understand, he had this look in his eyes, and there was something about him that told you he’d been through some stuff, you know.

Kido recalled Rié’s story of when Makoto Hara first appeared at the stationery shop in a similarly sudden way, and in his mind’s eye, the two scenes melded into one. Perhaps that had been Hara’s furtive way of interacting with different fragments of the world.

“Do you need to show some form of identification when you take the professional certification test?” “Not when you take the test, but when they issue the license, you need either a family register or a residence certificate.”

So I suggested he come up with a crazy ring name, one that would really stand out. But Makoto disagreed. Said he wanted something run-of-the-mill so he could blend in.” “Did he explain why?” “He wouldn’t say at the time. I heard the reason from him later. After he became the rookie king of east Japan.”

Makoto’s mother ditched him and he ended up in an orphanage till he graduated middle school. Sounds like school was tough as hell too, getting bullied and all the rest of it.”

Makoto’s old man killed a boy not much older than Makoto himself. It was the boy’s friends who really hated him.

“He never went to high school?” “He told me he enrolled in night school but dropped out almost immediately. Then he left the orphanage and, during the two, three years before he came here, lived as sort of a vagrant.

“Kenkichi Kobayashi was executed in 1993, when Hara-san was eighteen. Is that the period when he was homeless?” “Makoto had a grudge against his old man like you wouldn’t believe.

“Did he ever visit his father in jail?”

“Nope. Never went to meet him that I’m aware. He’d get letters, though.

“It was about two years after his father was executed that he showed up here.

“Makoto passed the pro test on his first try. Everything up to then was smooth sailing. Then he won the East Japan Rookie King Tournament, and suddenly he was the center of attention. Even more than usual ’cause he KO’d the guy in his title fight. This was before the internet,

when he was set to fight for the All Japan Rookie King Championship, he told Kosuge he wanted to pull out.

“Had someone in the boxing world recognized him?” “Nope . . . He wasn’t worried so much about being outed. It was more about whether he deserved the glory.”

“He said it grossed him out so bad to think that his father’s blood ran in his veins that he wanted to scratch himself open and scrape his own body off.

In the end, he gave him some advice. Said, look, your life is your own to lead, so if you’re really so torn up about it, why don’t you go and speak with the surviving family.

the murdered president of the construction company had had surviving parents and a younger brother.

“He fell off a balcony. From the sixth floor of his apartment building. Got badly injured. Broke a bunch of different bones.

But personally, I don’t think he wanted to die. He was just at his wit’s end and needed some way to escape from it all. The injury forced him to forfeit the rookie king fight. To me, he looked kind of relieved.”

It had been ages since the club churned out a pro. Makoto apologized, but once he got out of the hospital, he just vanished.

Kido gave a nod to shake his thoughts into order and began filling in his patchy notes. Only nine years of Makoto’s life remained unaccounted for, between his disappearance from the club and his reappearance in Town S as Daisuké Taniguchi.

When Kido returned home from the boxing club, he wrote out the story of Makoto Hara told by Kosuge and Yanagisawa as best he could remember it with the aid of his hurriedly scribbled notes.

And in the process, he noticed something so simple, he was amazed it had until then eluded him.

Omiura’s career in “past laundering” had begun the previous year. Oddly, what seemed to have inspired him to get into the racket was a news report concerning the murder of James Bulger in 1993.

When the two murderers completed their eight-year prison terms at the age of eighteen, they were given new identities so that they could start over as “different people” before being released, despite a vociferously opposed protest movement. Then, in June 2006, a tabloid revealed that one of them was working an office job and had gotten married without anyone realizing who he was.

Omiura had a “eureka moment” and came up with the idea of selling and swapping family registers.

many of Omiura’s customers engaged in multiple register trades if they were dissatisfied, and it was this fact that finally jogged Kido’s mind into a realization. The suggestion that X, aka Makoto Hara, had foisted his family register on Shozo Tashiro, making a mentally handicapped vagrant adopt the identity of an infamous murderer’s son, had nagged at Kido, making his drawn-out game of detective seem futile. As naive as it was, he simply could not reconcile that deed with the kind husband that lived in Rié’s

memory.

First, Hara had learned about Omiura online or through some other source and

become Sonézaki. Then, probably dissatisfied with the Sonézaki identity for some reason, he had swapped his new register with Daisuké Taniguchi and gone to Town S, where he met Rié. If this was correct, the upshot was that the real Daisuké now went by “Yoshihiko Sonézaki.”

Kido was keenly aware that his game of detective had stretched on far too long. Nevertheless, his anticipation of its approaching end and the emptiness that would surely follow called forth unspeakable loneliness.

Kenkichi Kobayashi, he was born in Yokkaichi in 1951.

Kobayashi physically abused both Makoto and his wife on a daily basis,

By the time Kobayashi committed his murders in the summer of 1985, collectors had reportedly been hounding him for some time.

During the slaughter of this man along with his wife and child, Kobayashi stole ¥136,000,

it was an established fact that Kobayashi’s early childhood environment had been deplorable,

In allowing this, the state had neglected to remedy the misfortune of one of its citizens. It had nonetheless exterminated him via capital punishment for violating the legal order it upheld,