Kimura's alcohol dependence and sobriety

Kimura's alcohol dependence and sobriety form a story of addiction understood as a disease, endured as a physical struggle, and carried into the crises that follow. His father's account describes dependence as a mechanism that persists beyond abstinence: Kimura can stop drinking, but the effort does not erase the vulnerability that makes a single drink dangerous. On the Shinkansen, memories of withdrawal and an encounter with Lemon bring that danger back into the present, even as Kimura insists that he no longer drinks.

Family Explanation and the Nature of Dependence

At a playground, while Kimura watches Wataru run toward a tall slide, he reaches for a flask. Kimura's father, who has quietly sat beside him, catches his hand and takes the flask. The intervention turns a brief pause in Kimura's duties as Wataru's playmate into a direct discussion of alcoholism. His father says Kimura is on the cusp of becoming a full alcoholic if he continues, and asks him to distinguish addiction from simply enjoying alcohol or being able to hold one's drink.

Kimura gives a rough definition based on liking alcohol and drinking heavily. His father sharpens it: alcoholism means addiction, a disease in which drinking does not remain under the drinker's control. He describes the decisive feature as an inability to stop once drinking begins, framing it as physiology rather than a test of resilience or restraint. The distinction matters to Kimura's story because it shifts the explanation away from a simple judgment of character without denying the danger of his behavior.

Kimura wonders whether the vulnerability is hereditary, asking if he has inherited it from his father or his mother. His father answers that neither he nor Kimura's mother drinks, because they know there is no recovery from alcoholism. The exchange places Kimura's drinking within a family conversation about risk and prevention, while also making clear that his parents' abstinence is not evidence that he has avoided dependence.

The Father's Account of Relapse

Kimura's father develops his explanation through the brain's A10 cells, which he says release pleasure signals when stimulated. He compares the repeated pursuit of that easy reward to an animal pressing a lever, then explains that alcohol stimulates the same cells. Drinking can therefore produce a feeling of accomplishment without the work that would ordinarily earn it; repeated reliance on that shortcut, he warns, changes the brain.

In his account, the change leaves a switch that flips when alcohol enters the body. A person may abstain long enough for addiction symptoms to disappear and return to ordinary life, yet remain susceptible to an immediate return to compulsive drinking after even one sip. His father explicitly separates that risk from willpower or resolve. The lesson is not that abstinence proves the underlying vulnerability has vanished, but that avoiding alcohol is the only way to keep the mechanism from being activated again.

Kimura responds skeptically to the technical explanation and changes the subject to the supposed ancient history of brandy. His father challenges the claim rather than accepting it, warning him not to believe everything he hears. He returns to the practical point: Kimura should give up alcohol entirely and seek satisfaction through good, honest work instead of alcohol or drugs. He advocates a proper job as a healthier source of accomplishment. The advice makes work an alternative to the easy reward of drinking, though the later narrative shows that understanding the principle does not make the struggle effortless.

Abstinence, Withdrawal, and Memory

While working on a combination lock aboard the Shinkansen, Kimura recalls how severe his drinking had been. If he went even a short time without alcohol, he became anxious and irritable. On more than one occasion, Wataru hid the alcohol in the apartment at his grandparents' instruction; Kimura searched the place for it and, when he could not find it, became desperate enough to consider drinking hair tonic. The memory gives concrete weight to the dependence his father had described: the craving reached beyond the intended drink and into a search for anything that might serve as a substitute.

Kimura is grateful that he never became violent with Wataru. That relief coexists with shame and fear: he imagines that if he had struck his son, remorse would have consumed him. His recollection therefore concerns not only what alcohol did to his body but the risk it posed to his responsibility as a father. Wataru's grandparents' efforts to hide the alcohol further show how his drinking affected family life, while Kimura's gratitude marks a boundary he believes he did not cross.

By the time of the train journey, Kimura has stopped drinking and thinks of himself as having clawed his way out of alcoholism. But Wataru is in a coma in the hospital, unable to see this new beginning. Kimura's relief at sobriety is thus entangled with grief: the change he struggled to achieve seems to him to have lost its meaning because his son cannot witness it. The novel does not present abstinence as a simple resolution; it places Kimura's hard-won change beside a family crisis that he cannot repair through self-control.

Lemon and the Test of Sobriety

The train's motion repeatedly recalls the physical strain of dependence. When it shakes and sways, Kimura remembers giving up alcohol cold turkey and fighting the urge with every ounce of will he had. He says that during those days his body shook even more than the train does. The comparison turns the moving carriage into a prompt for bodily memory: the past has not become an abstract lesson merely because Kimura has stopped drinking.

Lemon recognizes Kimura as someone who used to drink heavily. He explains that both his parents were alcoholics and that, with neither restraining the other, their addiction worsened. To describe helpless momentum, he recalls Duck being pushed by a freight train until it crashes into a barbershop. He says he kept his distance and hid in a corner, while Thomas helped him survive. His account supplies Kimura with a listener who speaks from a different position: Lemon grew up beside his parents' addiction, whereas Kimura speaks as someone who has experienced dependence himself.

Kimura answers that he does not drink anymore. Lemon accepts the distinction while insisting that a drink would be dangerous for someone with that history; he says he avoids alcohol because he believes he cannot fight his genes. He raises a bottle of mineral water, distinguishing it from alcohol as something that clears rather than clouds thought. As Kimura watches the liquid, however, it begins to seem to him like sweet alcohol. He recoils. The moment does not establish that he drinks or relapses; it shows how temptation can intrude on perception even while he remains abstinent.

Sobriety and Kimura's Changed Life

Kimura's recovery also sits beside his former occupation and his present work. When Lemon suspects that he is in the same line of work as Lemon and Tangerine, Kimura corrects him: he used to take on rough work, retired years earlier, and now works as a security guard. He acknowledges that he is rusty. This exchange does not explain his recovery, but it places his present identity in a life he describes as changed, much as his statement that he no longer drinks distinguishes the man on the train from the man who once searched the apartment for alcohol.

The account of Kimura's sobriety consequently holds two truths together. He has stopped drinking, and the effort is real; the cravings, remembered withdrawal, and imagined alcohol have not been reduced to a question of weak character or solved simply by a declaration. His father's model of dependence explains why abstinence must continue, while Kimura's fear for Wataru reveals what is at stake in that effort. Recovery is a beginning he has achieved, but one shadowed by the possibility of relapse and by the painful fact that his son is not there to see it.