Nanao’s mistaken kidnapping and escape is the childhood episode through which he first learned that he could rely on his own actions when help did not come. Taken in place of a wealthy friend, he was held with another boy, whose appeal for help he did not answer. Nanao escaped alone at eight, but the memory remained bound to a harder question: why he left the other child behind. The episode is both a successful escape and an unresolved source of trauma.

The mistaken abduction

Nanao recounts that he was walking home with a rich friend when a game of rock-paper-scissors left him carrying the friend’s bag. The bag was different from those carried by the rest of their group, a custom-made item associated with wealth. The kidnappers mistook its carrier for the boy they intended to take. Nanao told them that they had the wrong child, but at first they did not believe him. His friend, the actual target, remained safe at home with his parents.

That mismatch shaped what followed. The kidnappers demanded ransom from the wealthy friend’s parents, who did not take the demand seriously because their son was already with them. The kidnappers’ anger then fell on Nanao, and they treated him increasingly cruelly. Only after he continued insisting that they had taken the wrong boy did they accept the mistake. They contacted Nanao’s parents, reasoning that some payment would be better than none. The shift from mistaken identity to a demand directed at his own family did not, however, bring Nanao the rescue he needed.

A rescue that did not come

Nanao’s father had no money to give the kidnappers. Nanao understood his father’s response as a limit imposed by circumstance: even a parent who wanted to save his child could not provide what he did not possess. The kidnappers were upset and blamed his father, but Nanao grasped the practical consequence for himself. If his father could not secure his release, he would have to save himself. He later connected this realization to his sense that he could manage things on his own.

The escape itself survives in Nanao’s memory as a sequence of opportunity and uncertainty. He recalls the kidnappers’ carelessness, his own energy and determination, a railway crossing arm lowering at the right moment, and a bus arriving. Once the bus pulled away, relief was accompanied by fear: he had no money to pay the fare. Even so, he had escaped. The memory’s emphasis is not on a rescue by an adult or the recovery of the intended target, but on an eight-year-old acting for himself amid circumstances he could not control.

The boy left behind

Nanao’s escape did not include the other boy being held with him. The boy, unfamiliar to Nanao and distinguished in his recollection by a buzz cut, realized that Nanao was going to leave and asked for help. Nanao did not help him. In retrospect, he could not give a clear reason: he wondered whether the boy might have slowed him down, but said he did not remember deciding that, and thought the failure to help may have been instinctive. The uncertainty matters to the memory; Nanao does not turn his choice into a deliberate calculation he can confidently explain.

He never knew who the boy was or what happened to him. He describes that unknown child as his personal trauma and says that he would rather not think about him. As Nanao tells the story to a suited stranger, the memory seems to open in a series of mental compartments: the successful escape brings the image of the boy back with it. Nanao tries to close that recollection again, but cannot supply the ending the boy’s story lacks. His own freedom and the other child’s unknown fate remain inseparable parts of the same event.

Aftermath and significance

The kidnappers were never caught. Nanao’s father did not report the kidnapping to the police, believing that doing so would cause more trouble than it was worth, and Nanao himself did not particularly care at the time. He was proud that he had escaped. That pride does not erase the other boy’s unanswered plea; rather, the two memories sit uneasily together, one confirming Nanao’s ability to act and the other marking the limit of what he can remember or repair.

The episode also helps explain how Nanao frames later misfortune. While telling the stranger about the kidnapping, he links it to a life of mishaps and recalls failing his high-school entrance exam despite studying hard, after the student beside him kept sneezing. His account moves from a childhood danger he escaped through his own effort to smaller setbacks he treats as part of a continuing pattern. The book presents that pattern through Nanao’s recollection, not as proof that every later failure has the same cause.

Kimura’s reflections on helplessness offer a separate parallel rather than part of Nanao’s childhood episode. Kimura remembers a captive who did not leave even though the door was unlocked, and recalls an explanation of how repeated punishment can teach a person to stop trying. He sees a related pattern among schoolchildren afraid of the Prince: repeated suffering and the threat of electric shocks have helped convince them that resistance is futile. Against those examples, Nanao’s escape stands out as an instance in which he did act, while his father’s inability to pay and his own failure to assist the other boy prevent the story from becoming a simple account of self-reliance. The remembered event establishes both the resourcefulness Nanao takes pride in and the unresolved guilt he avoids examining.