A Man by Keiichiro Hirano — who is he? who am I?

Keiichiro Hirano’s first novel to be translated into English was a surprisingly intriguing novel about identity and understanding of one’s place in the world.

The plot of A Man centres on a mystery — what was the real identity of the man who lived quietly for years in Town S under the name of Daisuké Taniguchi. When he died suddenly in a freak accident at work, his widow Rié Takemoto reached out to his family, only to discover that her husband had been living a lie. His name and his history before she met him belonged to a completely different person.

Akira Kido, the lawyer she employs to discover the truth becomes obsessed by the case. It coincides with a period of crisis in his own life — a break down in his marriage — causing him to question his own history and how one’s identity could be erased. One version of a life replaced with one entirely different.

The progress of Kido’s inquiries is complex and convoluted, sometimes dragged out by unnecessary details, and losing momentum in the middle section. But his pursuit of self discovery and understanding held my attention. In his determination to solve the problem of the false Daisuké Taniguchi, Kido briefly adopts Taniguichi’s persona just to get to appreciate how it feels to live in another person’s skin.

Kido has his own issues of identity having been born into a Korean family who settled in Japan before the end of World War 2. He grew up as Japanese and is registered as a Japanese national but this does not save him from animosity, particularly with the rise of nationalism after the Great East Japan Earthquake. 

Such developments forced Kido to acknowledge that there were some people in the country he lived in that he did not wish to meet and some places that he did not wish to visit. This was not an experience that every individual — every citizen — necessarily had to come to terms with.

A Man delves into the complexities of human nature, asking almost existential questions how the forces that influence decisions and determine the future. Here’s one of the longer examples:

I suppose it’s a fact that the present is a result of the past. In other words, one is able to love someone in the present thanks to the past that made them the way they are. While genetics are surely a factor too, if that person had lived under different circumstances, they would have probably become a different person—but people are incapable of telling others their entire past, and regardless of their intentions, the past explained in words is not the past itself. If the past someone told diverged from the true past, would the love for that person be mistaken somehow? If it was an intentional lie, would that make it all meaningless? Or could it give rise to new love?

And a shorter one following the funeral of a man he had trained alongside as a junior lawyer.

I’m afraid to die, thought Kiro. The moment he died — and not a moment later — his consciousness would cease and he would be incapable of thinking or feeling anything ever again, leaving time to proceed with no connection to him,, passing solely for the sake of the living

Expositions like this lift the book above the run-of-the mill mystery stories. It won’t satisfy people who like fast-paced and eventful fiction but readers who enjoy thoughtful narratives that don’t necessarily reach full conclusion might want to give this a go.

A Man by Keiichiro Hirano: Footnotes

Keiichiro Hirano became a best-selling author with “Eclipse” in 1999, while still a university student. He has since written several other novels as well as essays , reviews and collections of interviews, often in collaboration with other artists. In 2004 he spent a year in Paris as a Japan Cultural Envoy of the Agency for Cultural Affairs.

He won Yomiuri Prize for Literature for his novel A Man published in Japan in 2018 and in an English translation by Amazon Crossing in 2020. My copy was provided by the publishers via NetGalley in return for an honest review.