Kimura's recovery from alcoholism

Kimura’s recovery from alcoholism is presented not as a return to an uncomplicated former self but as abstinence wrested from dependence, repeatedly tested by stress and shame. His father explains why stopping matters: alcohol can alter the brain’s response so that even one drink may reactivate compulsive drinking. Kimura later recognizes that he has clawed his way out of alcoholism, but the achievement arrives alongside Wataru’s coma, a loss that makes his new beginning feel painfully incomplete.

The meaning of dependence

During an outing with Wataru, Kimura sits on a park bench while his mother keeps up with the boy at the playground. He reaches for his flask, only for his father, who has quietly sat beside him, to take hold of his hand and then the flask. Their exchange turns an attempted drink into a direct conversation about alcoholism. Kimura’s father distinguishes addiction from simply enjoying alcohol or being able to tolerate it: for a dependent drinker, the first sip can lead to continued drinking, not because of a lack of resilience but because stopping has become difficult in a different, physiological sense.

Kimura’s father develops that explanation through the brain’s A10 cluster. He describes alcohol as stimulating cells associated with pleasure and an easy feeling of accomplishment, encouraging repetition. In his account, repeated stimulation changes the brain and leaves a switch that can be activated when alcohol enters the system. Even after a long period without drinking, and after the outward symptoms of addiction have disappeared, one sip can return a person to the old pattern. His comparison is meant to separate dependence from a simple test of resolve: the risk remains even when someone has managed to live normally without alcohol.

The conversation also makes clear that Kimura’s father understands abstinence as the necessary protection against that risk. He argues that there is no way to drink in moderation once dependence has taken hold, and urges Kimura not to seek accomplishment through alcohol or drugs. Instead, he recommends the satisfaction of honest work. Kimura responds dismissively to the explanation and challenges his father with a claim about brandy’s history, but his father answers that such claims should not be accepted uncritically. Their disagreement leaves the advice plain even when Kimura resists its manner: the proposed route out is complete abstention, not learning to manage a drink.

A lapse and its rationalization

The warning acquires a specific force when Kimura realizes that he has opened his flask and drunk without noticing. At the time, he is dealing with schoolboys who are distressed about the Prince, and Wataru is looking at the flask with concern and sadness. Kimura has to reconstruct what happened from the open container in his hand: he took it out, unscrewed the cap, and drank without consciously registering the act. The lapse is therefore not presented as a considered decision after weighing his father’s advice. It has taken place almost outside his awareness, while his son is watching.

Kimura quickly supplies himself with reasons. The boys have stressed him, he tells himself; he needs a drink to keep his wits about him and take care of Wataru. He experiences the alcohol as making his head feel clear and sharp, and turns that effect into an argument that it is not inherently bad so long as he knows how to use it. The account sets his self-justification beside Wataru’s expression: what Kimura describes to himself as practical and controlled is visible to his son as cause for concern. His reasoning also echoes the kind of willpower-based distinction his father had challenged, as though the drink’s immediate effect could prove that Kimura remained in control.

Sobriety under pressure

Later, while working at a combination lock aboard the Shinkansen, Kimura remembers the severity of his earlier drinking. When he went too long without alcohol, he became anxious and irritable. Wataru had sometimes hidden the alcohol in the apartment on his grandparents’ instructions, but Kimura searched the rooms for it and, when he could not find it, grew desperate enough to consider drinking hair tonic. These memories give concrete scale to the dependence his father had described: alcohol had become the focus of a search that displaced ordinary judgment and reached beyond drinking alcohol itself.

Kimura is also grateful that he never became violent with Wataru. He imagines the remorse of having struck his son as something that would have consumed him, a fear that links the history of dependence to his responsibilities as a father without equating the two. Wataru’s attempts to hide alcohol and his later concern at the park show how Kimura’s drinking has entered their family life, even though the passages do not describe him harming his son.

In the train’s cramped room, the lock’s repeated failure makes the task feel increasingly oppressive. Kimura remembers that he has stopped drinking and that his son is in a hospital coma. The timing sharpens his grief: he has made it out of the darkness of alcoholism, but Wataru is not there to witness that change. Recovery has not repaired what happened to his son or restored the future Kimura hoped to share with him; instead, his achievement seems robbed of meaning precisely because Wataru cannot see it.

Recovery and self-control

The lock task supplies a present-tense test of Kimura’s ability to contain anger. Ordered by the Prince to open the suitcase, he works through combinations from 0000 to 0261 without success. His frustration turns against the toilet bowl: he kicks it, stops himself, and returns to the task, repeating that effort to regain composure several times. He resents having to do the job for the Prince and thinks about waiting for a chance to punish him, but continues to make a show of following orders. The scene does not identify this anger as a return to drinking; rather, it places his sobriety within a wider struggle to manage impulses while frightened, humiliated, and grieving.

The contrast between the two periods is central to the state of recovery described here. At the park, Kimura can drink before he has fully registered the act, then defend it as useful. On the train, he remembers both the desperation that once drove him to search for alcohol and the fact that he has now stopped. His father’s account explains why abstinence is not proof that dependence has been erased: the vulnerability can persist even when the person is living without alcohol. Kimura’s recovery is thus real and hard-won, but neither effortless nor a cure for the losses surrounding it. The narrative gives it weight as a change in conduct and a source of painful pride, while leaving its fragility in view.