Wataru's coma

Wataru's coma is both a medical crisis and the pressure point through which Prince controls Kimura. While Wataru lies in the hospital, unable to take part in events or answer for himself, Prince makes his safety the price of Kimura’s cooperation. The condition also sharpens Kimura’s sense of loss: he has stopped drinking, but the son whose presence might have given that recovery meaning is out of reach.

Condition and Immediate Stakes

The evidence establishes that Wataru is in a coma in the hospital. It does not describe the medical course of the coma or offer an independent account of how he came to be injured. That silence matters: Wataru’s condition is presented chiefly through its consequences for those around him, especially the vulnerability it creates and the uncertainty it imposes on his father.

Prince invokes the hospitalized boy to make Kimura comply. When Kimura initially refuses to do what Prince asks, Prince warns that he would be sad if anything happened to Kimura’s little son. The threat turns a request into a test of paternal fear. Kimura responds with anger and dread, then asks what Prince wants him to do. His decision is shaped not by trust or agreement, but by the possibility that cooperation could keep Wataru from further danger.

Prince later releases Kimura from the tape restraining him, while continuing to rely on the same leverage. He calculates that Kimura is unlikely to act violently if doing so might endanger his son, and presents the request for help as an opportunity for Kimura to protect him. Kimura is therefore free to move but not free of the pressure imposed by Wataru’s condition. Prince directs him toward retrieving the suitcase from a trash bin in the train wall, tying the boy’s hospital crisis to the immediate action aboard the train.

Kimura’s Recovery and Fatherhood

Wataru’s coma acquires particular force against the history of Kimura’s drinking. During a conversation at a park, Kimura’s father takes his flask and warns him that alcoholism is addiction rather than simply drinking heavily. He describes dependence as a bodily mechanism: alcohol can produce an easy feeling of accomplishment, repeated drinking can alter the brain, and even one drink after a long period of sobriety can restore the inability to stop. His conclusion is that recovery requires giving up alcohol altogether, not relying on willpower to control a drink.

Kimura’s later recollection makes the cost of that dependence concrete. When he could not drink for a while, he became anxious and irritable; when Wataru hid the alcohol at his grandparents’ instructions, Kimura searched the apartment for it and became desperate enough to consider drinking hair tonic. He is grateful that he never became violent toward his son, but the memory establishes how close his addiction brought him to conduct he fears he could never have forgiven himself for. Wataru was already caught up in the consequences of his father’s drinking, even though Kimura had not crossed that particular line.

By the time Kimura is on the train, he has stopped drinking and understands himself to have struggled out of alcoholism. Yet Wataru is in a coma and cannot see the change. Kimura experiences that absence as a theft of meaning from his new beginning: the improvement is real, but the person whose safety and future make it matter is inaccessible. The coma thus does not simply interrupt their ordinary relationship; it prevents Kimura from sharing his recovery with the son he most wants to protect.

Prince’s Account and Kimura’s Questions

Kimura tries to understand why Prince harmed Wataru. Prince first gives a version in which Wataru followed him and his friends onto a roof, asked to join them, and fell after being warned that it was dangerous. Kimura rejects this account and presses him to explain why Wataru was the one who suffered. Prince then admits that the point was to get at Kimura. The exchange identifies the boy’s injury not as an unrelated misfortune in Prince’s own telling, but as a means of hurting his father.

The account remains Prince’s, not an independently verified explanation of the fall. Its significance lies partly in that distinction: Kimura is given a claim about what happened, but no reassurance that resolves his son’s condition or restores his ability to reach him. Prince’s admission clarifies the intended target of the harm while making Wataru’s vulnerability still more disturbing. The child has been used to attack Kimura, and the coma leaves him unable to challenge the story or speak for himself.

Narrative Significance

Wataru’s coma reorganizes Kimura’s choices around a person who is absent from the train but present in every threat. Prince exploits the gap between physical distance and emotional attachment: Kimura cannot protect his son by reaching him directly, so he is pushed into actions whose terms Prince sets. The suitcase plot and the hospital crisis become inseparable because Prince makes cooperation seem like Kimura’s only available way to reduce danger to Wataru.

The coma also sets Kimura’s recovery beside an unresolved family crisis. His father’s explanation of alcoholism insists that a person cannot safely return to drinking and that meaningful accomplishment must come from sustained effort. Kimura has made the difficult change, but the coma denies him the immediate confirmation he longs for: Wataru cannot witness it, respond to it, or reassure him. The evidence leaves Wataru hospitalized and unconscious, with no outcome for his condition established here. That unresolved state keeps the stakes open and makes Kimura’s hope for his son—not money, the suitcase, or his own redemption—the emotional center of Prince’s leverage.