Shinjuku is more than a backdrop in the novel: its street-level sex trade, busy transport routes, and large hotels become parts of Kawashima Masayuki’s scheme to choose a target and avoid attention. He treats the district as a map of opportunities and risks, yet the public spaces he tries to exploit also expose him to chance encounters that disrupt his careful calculations.

District and urban setting

Two nights before his hotel stay, Kawashima walks through Kabuki-cho in Shinjuku and observes freelance street workers. He considers whether a woman without a pimp or office would be less likely to be reported missing, and weighs the practical difficulties of approaching someone outdoors. His scrutiny reduces people to elements in a plan, including assumptions about nationality and whether a potential target would speak Japanese. The scene establishes the district as a place where commercial opportunity and vulnerability overlap, while showing how selectively and instrumentally Kawashima reads its streets.

The prospect of an alley or other outdoor location soon gives way to the idea of using a hotel room. Kawashima considers different kinds of sex businesses and lodging, judging them by how easily he might control the circumstances and escape notice. These are his calculations, not a reliable account of how the district or its businesses operate; the narrative presents them as a would-be attacker’s attempt to turn a complicated city into a manageable set of conditions.

West Shinjuku and the hotel plan

Kawashima looks to West Shinjuku for a hotel with a busy reception desk and poor service, reasoning that inattentive staff would pay less attention to guests. He considers several hotels and plans to inspect them after making reservations under different names. His attention to check-in procedures, identification, handwriting, and possible witnesses makes the district’s hotels part of his imagined system for evading detection.

The Keio Plaza Hotel becomes the setting for his eventual stay. On a Friday afternoon, he arrives by hotel bus from the west exit of Shinjuku Station at 2:55. The lobby is crowded with wedding guests and people attending a Shinjuku-ward accountants’ gathering and a computer-manufacturers’ conference. The congestion works as he hoped: the desk clerk gives him little attention, and no bellboy approaches. He checks into a room on the twenty-ninth floor, carrying an overnight bag with a change of clothes and concealed tools. His arrival appears to confirm his theory that a busy hotel can provide anonymity.

A calculated setting disrupted

The hotel’s rooms and corridors do not remain under Kawashima’s control. Later, while moving along a corridor, he notices an elderly couple behind him and worries that they might remember which floor he visits or see items connecting him to his plan. He turns back rather than sharing the elevator with them. The small manoeuvre brings him unexpectedly face to face with Sanada Chiaki, who stumbles out of room 2902 in a visibly distressed and injured state.

Kawashima freezes, then waits until the couple has disappeared around the corner before sprinting toward Chiaki. The corridor that he had treated as a risk to be managed becomes the site of an encounter he did not plan. Shinjuku’s hotels thus provide not only the apparent cover he seeks but also the close, unpredictable human contact that unsettles his calculations.

Narrative significance

Shinjuku’s significance lies in the contrast between Kawashima’s abstract planning and the city’s actual density. He studies crowds, workers, reception desks, and hotel layouts as if each could be assigned a predictable role; the busy Keio Plaza lobby initially seems to reward that approach. But a shared corridor, nearby strangers, and Chiaki’s sudden appearance cannot be reduced to the safeguards he has considered.

The setting also links different kinds of urban space: the street economy of Kabuki-cho, Shinjuku Station’s west exit, and the controlled interiors of West Shinjuku hotels. Moving between them, Kawashima attempts to convert ordinary city infrastructure into cover for violence. The novel makes that effort precarious: the same public movement that offers anonymity can bring people into one another’s paths, and the hotel corridor becomes the point where his plan meets an unforeseen crisis.