University of Tokyo

The University of Tokyo is the university Junpei enters in the spring of 1967, having chosen its law department largely because his parents and teachers considered it the best path. It also marks a point of separation from his high-school girlfriend, who declines to pursue a place there and instead attends a women’s college in Kobe. In these stories, the institution is less a destination freely chosen than a measure of how differently two young people imagine the future.

Junpei’s admission and uncertainty

Junpei recalls that he was capable at school—good at mathematics, English, and sports—and expected to enter a good university. Yet achievement had not clarified what he wanted. He could imagine studying law, engineering, or medicine, but none of them excited him; with no guiding principle of his own, he accepted the advice of his parents and teachers and enrolled in the law department at the University of Tokyo. His admission therefore signals academic promise without corresponding certainty about purpose.

That uncertainty fits the life he describes as orderly and externally approved. He had learned to stay within boundaries, following what seemed like a well-marked route, and others praised him for doing so. The university choice continues that pattern: a prestigious and apparently sensible next step, but not the outcome of a clearly articulated personal ambition.

A choice that separates the couple

In the spring of 1967, Junpei entered the University of Tokyo while his girlfriend went to a women’s college in Kobe. Her school was a first-rate institution, and she could have applied to a more selective university, possibly even the University of Tokyo. She chose not to take the entrance examination. She explained that she did not need to study further or pursue a career in the Ministry of Finance; as a woman, she saw herself as differently situated from Junpei and wanted to spend the next four years enjoying herself before marriage changed her options.

Junpei was disappointed. He had hoped that they would both go to Tokyo and begin their relationship afresh, and he pleaded with her to join him. She refused, and their paths diverged geographically as well as in their expectations for the years ahead. The summer after his first year, they still met frequently when he returned home, but he sensed that reality was beginning to come between them.

Education and the passage into adulthood

The university’s place in the story is closely tied to the transition from adolescence into adult life. Junpei’s girlfriend’s decision treats college as a finite interval for pleasure before marriage; his own enrollment follows a conventional route toward a respected profession, even though he has not decided what he wants from it. Their different choices expose a mismatch that neither academic success nor the continuation of their old intimacy resolves.

The contrast also belongs to a broader generational setting. The narrator places his twentieth birthday amid the energetic student movement of the 1960s, recalling a period experienced as unusually vivid and full of promise, though difficult to define in retrospect. Against that atmosphere of collective intensity, Junpei’s admission to the University of Tokyo is a concrete personal milestone—but one that does not by itself tell him what his life is for.