Wataru Kimura's Department Store Rooftop Fall is the act of calculated cruelty that leaves six-year-old Wataru unconscious and turns Kimura’s grief into a determination to reach the person responsible. Prince uses the boy’s unfamiliarity with cruelty against him: a warm smile and false reassurance make Wataru trust the very person who is about to push him. The scene’s defining reversal is not simply that Wataru falls, but that his confidence in another person is deliberately made the means of his injury.

Background and Participants

Wataru is six when Prince’s classmates help take him onto the roof of a department store. They are described as Prince’s friends, but their role is more specific than companionship: they follow his orders. The scene therefore presents the assault as an exercise of Prince’s authority over other children, with Wataru isolated as its target. The evidence identifies no independent quarrel between Wataru and the classmates; the danger comes from a group carrying out Prince’s direction.

The difference in experience between the children is central. Wataru has never encountered cruelty before and is frightened on the roof. Prince recognizes that fear and answers it not with protection but with a performance of kindness. The vulnerable child’s lack of suspicion gives Prince an opening to control what Wataru believes about the danger around him.

The Deception and the Fall

Prince directs Wataru toward the railing and tells him to look down, assuring him that it is safe and that he need not be afraid. He speaks with a warm smile. Wataru accepts the reassurance and asks whether he will fall. His question makes the risk plain, but it does not interrupt Prince’s plan: the boy is seeking confirmation from the person who has already decided to harm him.

Prince pushes Wataru. The account gives no extended description of the fall itself; instead, it concentrates the moment into the betrayal that precedes it and Prince’s response afterward. He remembers that pushing the child felt intensely good. That reaction makes the violence more than an impulsive shove in the scene’s presentation: the pleasure belongs to Prince’s own recollection of what he did, and stands against the frightened trust Wataru had placed in him. Wataru is left unconscious and unresponsive, later lying in a hospital bed.

Consequences for Wataru and Kimura

The fall’s immediate consequence is Wataru’s unconscious condition. At Tokyo Station, Kimura sees a child with a backpack and thinks of his son in the hospital, beautiful but unresponsive in bed. Kimura’s mother has cried out that Wataru looks as if he is sleeping and might even hear what the family says. Kimura experiences the sight of his son as an inward devastation; remembering the roof and the child’s present condition makes the harm impossible for him to treat as an abstraction.

Grief becomes anger. Kimura thinks that the world is broken if someone can push a six-year-old from a department-store roof and continue walking around as if nothing had happened. He is traveling on the Hayate with a handgun in his coat, intending to approach his target from behind. As he boards, he insists to himself that he has quit drinking, can walk straight, and has steady hands. The details connect his attempt to act against Prince with the physical discipline he believes he must maintain; they do not lessen the violence that has brought him onto the train.

Recollection and Significance

The rooftop assault enters the train confrontation through two sharply different perspectives. Kimura carries its aftermath as the image of his unconscious son and the source of his rage. Prince, looking from the train at a Shinkansen racing past, reflects on overwhelming force and on his own capacity to destroy people. The narrative then turns to the earlier roof scene: the contrast between the huge train’s visible power and Prince’s quiet, interpersonal method of harm makes his assurance to Wataru especially chilling. He did not need speed or physical spectacle to make the child powerless; he used the boy’s trust.

The fall is consequently both a specific act against Wataru and the cause of the confrontation that brings Kimura and Prince together aboard the train. Its remembered details—the railing, the warm smile, Wataru’s fearful question, and Prince’s pleasure—also expose the moral distance between them. Wataru approaches the encounter believing another person’s reassurance; Prince turns that belief into an instrument of injury. The account establishes the cruelty behind Kimura’s pursuit without presenting the rooftop violence as a misunderstanding or an accident.