Noma Kiyoshi

Noboru Wataya is Kumiko’s brother, Toru Okada’s brother-in-law, and a politician whose public influence becomes entangled with the novel’s private history of violence and its unstable boundary between worlds. The reported attack on him appears to connect Toru to a crime, yet in the physical world Wataya collapses from a stroke rather than being struck by a bat. His survival leaves both the meaning of Toru’s otherworldly actions and Kumiko’s freedom unresolved.

Public Figure and Private History

Wataya appears first in this evidence as a familiar face on television, where Toru learns that something has happened to him only after missing the beginning of the report. The broadcast identifies him as a representative and describes an attack at his office in Tokyo’s Minato Ward. A caller had concealed a baseball bat inside a long cardboard mailing tube; at about eleven-thirty in the morning, he brought it into a meeting and attacked without warning. Wataya was taken to Tokyo Women’s Medical University Hospital with severe head injuries and had not regained consciousness. The report says the assailant left after making sure Wataya was unconscious, while witnesses described a man in a navy pea coat and wool ski hat, dark glasses, and a bruiselike mark on his right cheek.

The account is delivered through the measured conventions of a news bulletin: studio narration, a reporter outside the hospital, images of Wataya’s office, and footage of police at the scene. Toru’s recognition of Wataya’s face turns that impersonal sequence into a personal crisis. When the broadcast describes the attacker’s clothes and cheek mark, Toru recognizes a likeness to himself. The public report therefore does more than announce Wataya’s condition: it makes Toru confront the possibility that the other world has produced a version of events for which he could be held responsible in this one.

Family Secrets and Toru’s Explanation

Later, in the darkness, Toru offers Kumiko a speculative account of the family history she has been unable to explain. He proposes that the Wataya family may carry an inherited tendency that frightened her and contributed to her panic when she became pregnant. He also suspects that Kumiko’s elder sister did not die of food poisoning, as the family account held, but died by suicide after an experience involving Wataya. Toru connects this conjecture to Creta Kano, whom he believes Wataya’s power affected violently, while Kumiko’s sister, living in the same household with no place to escape, could not endure it. These are Toru’s interpretations, not independently confirmed facts in this scene; Kumiko remains silent as he speaks.

Toru extends his theory from the household to politics. He believes Wataya has magnified his power and learned to direct it through television and other media toward society at large, drawing out what people keep hidden in their unconscious for political advantage. In Toru’s account, this force is linked to violence, blood, and the darkest parts of history, with the potential to destroy people on a massive scale. The interpretation makes Wataya more than a private antagonist in Toru’s mind: it casts his political reach as a means of transmitting an obscure, dangerous influence. The scene preserves uncertainty, however. Toru explicitly presents the family tendency as his own imagination, and his larger explanation remains an attempt to make sense of events rather than a settled revelation.

The Other-World Attack and the Public Collapse

When Nutmeg brings a newspaper, she tells Toru that Wataya collapsed the previous night in Nagasaki after giving a speech and dining with the event’s organizers. The account identifies a suspected stroke, possibly connected to a congenital weakness in a brain blood vessel. Wataya remains unconscious; the newspaper says he may be bedridden for some time and might be unable to speak even if he regains consciousness. Nutmeg reports that this will probably end his political career. The circumstances contrast sharply with the television report Toru recalls: the earlier scene placed Wataya in his Akasaka office, under attack with a baseball bat, while the later report describes a public medical collapse in Nagasaki.

Toru gradually accepts the newspaper account as fact and the televised attack as belonging to another world. Because the television assailant resembled him and he had no alibi, this distinction brings immediate relief: in this world, he did not beat Wataya with a bat, and there is no crime for which police can investigate or arrest him. Yet the two accounts do not become unrelated. Toru believes that killing someone in the other world destroyed something inside Wataya, or something powerfully connected to him, and that this may explain his collapse. He thinks Wataya may have sensed what was coming, but recognizes that the otherworldly violence failed to take his life. Wataya’s survival thus turns relief into a new uncertainty: Toru wonders whether Kumiko can escape her brother while he remains alive and whether Wataya can continue to exert power over her from unconsciousness.

Kumiko’s Decision and Wataya’s Narrative Role

Kumiko’s letter makes clear the personal stakes of Wataya’s survival. She tells Toru that she intends to go to her brother’s hospital room and disconnect his life-support system, waiting until he is dead before surrendering to the police. She expects arrest and trial, and says she will offer no explanation or defense. Her stated purpose is to end the life of Wataya, a single human being, and she accepts imprisonment without fear because, in her account, she has already endured the worst. The letter does not merely confirm a conflict between brother and sister; it presents Kumiko as making a deliberate choice and accepting its legal consequences.

Wataya’s condition therefore holds together the novel’s political, familial, and otherworldly lines without resolving them into a single explanation. On television, he is the victim of an attack whose description implicates Toru; in the later newspaper account, he is an unconscious man whose collapse may end his political career; in Toru’s interpretation, he remains a source of power that can reach from private family history into public life. Kumiko’s planned action makes that unresolved survival urgent. The available account establishes her intention, but does not establish its eventual outcome.