Wataru Kimura's coma

Wataru Kimura’s coma is the lasting consequence of the Prince’s violence and the central uncertainty that drives Kimura’s actions aboard the Shinkansen. For a month and a half Wataru lies unresponsive in hospital, with no assurance that he will wake. His condition makes revenge inseparable from care: Kimura leaves his son’s bedside only when he believes he must act, and, once imprisoned on the train, fears that any harm to the Prince could also put Wataru in danger. The eventual report that Wataru has opened his eyes does not erase the long uncertainty, but it reverses the apparent direction of the story at the moment Kimura is closest to despair.

The injury and its aftermath

The coma follows the Prince’s attack on Wataru. When the Prince later hears Kimura describe his grandson’s fall from a department-store roof and the resulting coma, he recognizes the event from the inside: he remembers Wataru’s bewildered terror as he shoved the boy into space. In conversation, however, he performs sympathy, reacting as though he is hearing the account for the first time. The contrast makes Wataru’s condition more than a medical crisis. It is also a concealed consequence of the Prince’s violence, which the injured child cannot explain and which his father has not yet connected to the person pretending to share his concern.

For the month and a half after Wataru enters the coma, Kimura barely leaves the hospital. Wataru cannot respond or converse, so his father cannot encourage him through an exchange of words. Kimura instead undertakes the practical care available to him: changing his son’s clothes, moving him in bed, and staying beside him. The work does not produce visible progress, and the hospital’s demands steadily accumulate as fatigue erodes Kimura’s ability to sleep well.

Wataru is not alone in a private room. As many as six children may share the room, with their parents staying alongside them. At first, Kimura, accustomed to treating others as enemies or as people who keep their distance, does not know what to make of the other families. They do not press him into small talk or conspicuously avoid him. Watching him sit by Wataru and mutter to the unconscious boy, they recognize a struggle like their own. Their sympathetic looks gradually make the shared room feel like common ground: Kimura comes to think of them as people on the same team, sitting together on the same bench.

An uncertain prognosis

The doctors offer no firm timetable. As Kimura tells the Prince, they are doing what they can, but Wataru might wake at any time or might never wake. The two possibilities coexist without resolution. The coma is therefore not presented as a settled outcome but as suspended time: each day brings the ordinary work of keeping Wataru cared for, while the question of whether he will regain consciousness remains open.

The other parents give Kimura a more intimate version of that uncertainty. When he says he must be away for work for a day, one mother reminds him that the day he leaves could be the day Wataru wakes. Her optimism is sincere, not teasing, and she offers to help if Kimura is gone longer than expected. Kimura accepts the offer and says that he will be away for one day. The exchange joins practical care to hope without confusing hope with a prediction: she cannot promise Wataru will wake, but she can promise that he will not be left without someone attentive to him.

Kimura does not tell his own parents where he is going. He expects them to condemn his decision to leave Wataru in order to seek revenge by killing a schoolboy, a plan he believes would be incomprehensible to them. He sees the train journey as brief and direct: point his gun at the Prince, pull the trigger, and return to the hospital. The confidence of that imagined sequence is undercut by the facts he cannot control, above all Wataru’s condition and the possibility that the boy may wake while he is gone.

The coma as leverage on the train

Once the Prince has left the train car with the suitcase, Kimura watches the landscape flash past the window. Bound at his hands and ankles, he cannot settle into a comfortable position. The Shinkansen enters a tunnel, whose roar rattles the windows, and the darkness prompts him to think of Wataru in the hospital: for his son, too, everything seems black and uncertain. The image links the train’s physical passage through darkness to the unanswered question of Wataru’s recovery, and Kimura’s thought of his son turns that uncertainty into pain.

The Prince’s claim that Wataru’s safety depends on keeping him alive holds Kimura between rage and fear. At first he imagines the Prince encountering the suitcase’s owners and being roughed up; almost immediately, he remembers that if the Prince is harmed, Wataru might be endangered too. Kimura wonders whether the promised threat at the hospital is real or merely a bluff designed to keep him obedient. He cannot verify it. Because even a small chance of danger to Wataru is enough, he forces himself to keep the Prince alive, though the restraint makes him furious and he struggles to control his ragged breathing.

The coma thus restricts Kimura even when Wataru is nowhere near the train. Kimura regrets leaving his son alone, and the memory of the hospital complicates every choice he makes under coercion. He has already spent weeks providing care; now he must judge whether protecting the person who caused Wataru’s injury is also necessary to protect Wataru. The condition functions as both a real absence of response and a pressure applied by the Prince, whose account of the danger Kimura cannot confirm or safely dismiss.

A brief awakening and reversal

Near the train’s final stop, Shigeru calls with an apology. He explains that he stumbled, or flailed, and woke Wataru, who had been sleeping peacefully. The boy opened his eyes, mumbled, and smacked his lips a couple of times. At first Kimura interprets the apology as news of an accident involving a machine. Only when Shigeru clarifies does Kimura ask whether Wataru really woke up. The distinction in his response marks the instant when irritation and apprehension give way to astonishment.

Akiko Kimura’s face lights up when she hears the news; across from them, the Prince’s expression freezes. Shigeru confirms that Wataru truly opened his eyes and apologizes for disturbing him. Kimura answers that he is glad he asked Shigeru for help. He had called his friend, one of his few connections in Tokyo, without knowing whether Wataru was actually in danger, and Shigeru’s intervention has brought news that Kimura could not have secured for himself from the train.

The report establishes a moment of waking, not a full recovery or a prognosis. Wataru’s brief response changes what Kimura can hope for, but the account does not say that he has left the hospital or that his coma has ended permanently. Its force lies in the contrast between the doctors’ unresolved alternatives and the concrete signs Shigeru describes. After a month and a half in which Kimura has cared for a boy unable to answer him, Wataru’s opened eyes and small movements make the possibility of return newly present.