Morioka Station

Morioka Station is where the Hayate Shinkansen’s arrival brings Nanao’s unintended journey to a halt and exposes the scale of the operation surrounding the train. For Kimura and his wife, the station marks a moment of anxious hope; for Nanao, it is an exhausted escape into a platform already filling with Minegishi’s men.

Arrival and Setting

As the train pulls into Morioka Station, Kimura feels anxiety rising, but Akiko Kimura steadies him by insisting that Yuichi is tough and must still be alive because he would worry too much about Wataru to give in. Kimura agrees, imagining that even a giant shoe could stomp on Yuichi without killing him. Their exchange makes the arrival a brief point of reassurance amid the danger still unfolding aboard the train.

Nanao’s Unexpected Arrival

Nanao gets off at Morioka Station though he had been supposed to leave at Ueno. What he expected to be a five-minute train trip has stretched to more than two and a half hours and carried him five hundred kilometres north. He is baffled and exhausted, with his body leaden and his mind feeling like gauze; the distance travelled has not brought him any sense of having reached safety.

The Search for the Train

On the platform, men in suits stand in groups of five in front of each car, forming a human wall as passengers disembark and make their way to the escalators. Nanao expects them to recognize him and ask about the suitcase, but they show no interest in him. Instead, they surge aboard the newly arrived Hayate and search through it so thoroughly that the train resembles a house being ransacked. The narration compares them to ants hollowing out a great earthworm as they sweep through its interior.

Nanao knows that the search is likely to uncover the bodies in the toilet and the Wolf’s body where he left it in a seat. He hurries away from the train, then sees Minegishi at its front, surrounded by men in black suits. The apparent army of ants is Minegishi’s force. As a conductor steps up to Minegishi, Morioka Station becomes the point where Nanao’s private misfortune meets the organized search for what happened aboard the train.