Naoya Teshigawara

Naoya Teshigawara is one of the central students in Yomiyama North Middle School Third-Year Class 3 and Koichi Sakakibara’s friend. Initially associated with the class’s deliberate silence toward Koichi and Mei Misaki, he later becomes one of the first students to resume speaking to Koichi after Mr. Kubodera’s suicide. His energetic manner conceals a serious need to understand the Yomiyama phenomenon, but that need eventually hardens into a fatal certainty: believing Tomohiko Kazami to be the Extra Person, he attacks him and claims to have killed him.

Identity and Introduction

Naoya is presented through Koichi’s perspective as a conspicuous, talkative boy who can retreat into the role of the “bleached airhead.” After Mr. Kubodera’s suicide, however, he abruptly returns to ordinary conversation with Koichi, casually discussing everything under the sun despite having ignored him only days earlier. When Koichi points out the reversal, Naoya admits that being forced to snub him had hurt him too and that he had been unable to explain the reason. This confession establishes both his loyalty and his vulnerability to the class’s collective rules.

Naoya’s concern is not limited to Koichi. Once the class stops treating Mei as “not there,” he notices the reversal and participates in the altered social order surrounding her. The change is subtle because Mei is not especially social, but it marks Naoya’s movement away from passive compliance and toward direct engagement with the people whom the class had symbolically excluded.

Friendship and Collective Crisis

Naoya’s friendship with Koichi becomes most visible when he speaks to him after the suicide. Rather than offering a detached explanation, he tries to prevent Koichi from collapsing under guilt, telling him that nothing he could have done would have changed what happened. His blunt reassurance is emotionally awkward, but it gives their friendship a practical form: Naoya refuses to let Koichi remain isolated after the disaster.

He also shares the class’s growing unease about the disasters. When Koichi, Naoya, and Yuya Mochizuki discuss the account of Katsumi Matsunaga, Naoya recognizes that the story has a disturbing power to occupy the mind. His reaction shows that the old recording is not merely historical information for him. It becomes a framework through which present-day behavior, memory, and identity can be interpreted.

Investigation and Mistaken Certainty

Naoya investigates Tomohiko Kazami secretly, testing Kazami’s memories of childhood experiences they supposedly shared. Kazami cannot remember their former riverbank meeting place or a childhood attempt to cycle toward the ocean. To Naoya, these gaps are not ordinary failures of memory. They become evidence that Kazami has ceased to exist in the normal way and may be the Extra Person.

His reasoning is shaped by Matsunaga’s account: after Matsunaga killed the Extra Person during the camping trip fifteen years earlier, the victim vanished from everyone’s memory except Matsunaga’s. Naoya therefore tries to reproduce Matsunaga’s test, treating forgotten shared experiences as a diagnostic sign. The method converts uncertainty into a dangerous binary. Instead of holding open several explanations for Kazami’s memory loss, Naoya interprets the missing memories as confirmation of a supernatural identity.

The consequences are immediate and devastating. Naoya tells Koichi that he was convinced Kazami was the Extra Person and that he killed him. His bloodshot, tearful state makes the confession less like a triumphant revelation than a breakdown under the weight of his own conclusion. The episode is an extreme example of how the class’s search for a single responsible figure transforms fear into scapegoating and violence.

From Violence to the Disasters

Naoya’s investigation takes place within the same atmosphere of accusation that had already targeted Mei and Koichi. Izumi Akazawa argues that both Mei and Koichi bear responsibility for the disasters and demands an apology from Mei after she stops being treated as “not there.” Naoya challenges Akazawa rather than simply accepting her demand, asking what should be done now. Yet his own later conduct reveals the danger of the same logic in another form: rejecting one public target does not prevent him from privately creating another.

The pattern surrounding him repeatedly joins ordinary spaces to sudden violence. Mr. Kubodera withdraws a sharp-bladed object from a bag in the classroom; Koichi later enters a dark dining hall after discovering blood and encounters a fire; and at the Sakitani Memorial Hall, the deaths are ultimately attributed not to the fire but to deliberate attacks. The coroner’s findings identify Kensaku Numata as stabbed in the neck with cooking skewers, four students as killed by repeated stabbing and cutting, and Izumi as dying after her spine snapped in a fall from a second-floor balcony. Mieko Numata is found responsible for the six deaths and dies after biting through her tongue in an apparent suicide attempt. Against this escalating background, Naoya’s assault on Kazami belongs to a broader collapse of protective judgment, in which suspicion repeatedly outruns knowledge.

Change and Narrative Role

Naoya begins as a classmate who is constrained by the “not there” strategy but still capable of recognizing its cruelty. His return to Koichi and his awareness of Mei’s renewed social presence suggest a movement toward human connection. His later investigation, however, shows how quickly that connection can be displaced by the demand for certainty. The recording of Matsunaga’s confession gives him a model for action, while Kazami’s forgotten memories supply what Naoya takes to be proof.

His role is therefore both personal and structural. He is Koichi’s friend, the voice that tries to interrupt isolation, and a participant in the class’s effort to understand the disasters. At the same time, he becomes an example of the phenomenon’s social danger: when a community treats the Extra Person as a hidden culprit, the search for safety can authorize an individual to act as investigator, judge, and executioner. Naoya’s tragedy lies not in indifference but in the moment when loyalty, fear, and a desire to protect others fuse into an unjustified certainty.