Prince–Wataru hostile relationship

Prince–Wataru hostile relationship is a relationship of direct, extreme asymmetry: Wataru is the child Prince pushed from a department-store roof, and the resulting coma becomes both a source of danger and a means for Prince to manipulate Wataru’s family. Prince remembers the act without remorse, performs concern while discussing it, and later allows a potential attack at the hospital to become part of his calculation against Wataru’s grandparents.

The Attack and Its Aftermath

Prince’s hostility is established through his memory of pushing Wataru from the roof. When Shigeru Kimura explains that Wataru has been in a coma since the fall, Prince acts as though he is hearing the news for the first time. Inwardly, however, he remembers Wataru’s terror at the moment he shoved him into space. The contrast between the account Prince gives the adults and what he recalls for himself makes clear that his sympathetic response is a performance, not evidence of regret.

The fall leaves Wataru unconscious in the hospital, and that condition extends the consequences of Prince’s violence beyond the original act. The evidence does not describe Wataru’s experience of the coma or show him able to respond to Prince. Instead, it presents his medical vulnerability through the actions and assumptions of others: Prince treats the hospital as a place where a further attack might occur, while Wataru’s family fears that he may not be safe there. This difference in access to information gives Prince practical power over the situation even while Wataru is absent from the confrontation.

The Hospital Threat

Prince has received a call from a man waiting inside the hospital, disguised as a nurse and ready to act against Kimura’s son. The caller sounds eager to proceed. Prince tells him to follow a rule: if Prince does not answer after ten rings, the man may go ahead. The arrangement establishes a conditional threat against Wataru, not a completed attack. The evidence does not confirm that the man reaches Wataru’s room or harms him.

Later, Prince notices a missed call and concludes that it almost certainly came from the man at the hospital. He considers several possible reasons for the call, including that the man might have become uneasy or impatient. The phone has rung far more than ten times without Prince answering, so Prince judges that the man may now be on his way to Wataru’s room with murderous intent. He is not certain the man will follow through; his conclusion rests partly on his belief that people tend to behave as he expects. The threat therefore reveals both the danger to Wataru and the limits of Prince’s control: he has created the conditions for an attack but cannot know whether his agent will act.

Feigned Concern and Concealment

When Shigeru tells Prince about Wataru’s coma, Prince offers a shocked display of sympathy, even remarking on how frightening the fall must have been. That response is sharply contradicted by his private memory of causing it. The performance lets him conceal what he knows from Shigeru and Akiko Kimura while presenting himself as an uninformed listener. Wataru’s suffering becomes something Prince can discuss theatrically, detached from his own responsibility for it.

Prince also withholds the hospital threat from the grandparents. He imagines that telling them Wataru may be in immediate danger would make Shigeru react violently or call the hospital for help. Instead, Prince plans to reveal the news of their tragedy later and use their grief and guilt to weaken their ability to make decisions. His plan is not simply to harm Wataru: it is to turn the possibility of harm into pressure on the adults who care about him. At this point, the intended manipulation remains Prince’s plan; the evidence does not establish that he carries it out or that Wataru dies.

The Relationship’s Wider Stakes

Akiko raises the possibility that someone from the past might resent her and Shigeru and take that grievance out on Wataru. Shigeru’s startled response shows that the danger has made them reconsider whether their grandson is protected by being in hospital. Their fear is grounded in Wataru’s helpless situation, while Prince possesses information they lack and deliberately keeps it from them. The relationship thus places Wataru at the center of a conflict whose immediate contest is between Prince and the adults trying to protect him.

In the same train conversation, Prince returns to the question of why killing people is wrong, a question he regards as one adults cannot satisfactorily answer. Set beside his remembered assault and his willingness to leave a possible attacker to act, the question exposes a gap between abstract moral debate and the consequences of his choices. The text does not present Wataru as an opponent capable of answering or confronting Prince; the hostility is enacted by Prince against a child who is unconscious and absent. That imbalance is essential to the relationship: Prince’s apparent sympathy, his control of the information, and his plans for the grandparents all extend the original violence without showing Wataru’s perspective or confirming the threat’s outcome.