Itoh

Itoh is a reserved student in an oil-painting department whose friendship gives Toru Watanabe a place to talk about art, books, and music. Their connection is modest and episodic, but its importance lies in the relief it brings: in Itoh’s company, listening to Mozart and looking toward the moon, Watanabe feels calm for the first time in a long while.

Identity and Introduction

Itoh is introduced as a student Watanabe meets while working at a restaurant. Their acquaintance develops slowly: Itoh is gentle and quiet, and it takes time before he begins to speak with Watanabe. He is slim and good-looking, with shorter hair and cleaner clothes than the stereotypical art student. Though he says little, he has definite tastes and opinions.

Reading and music provide their first common ground. After work, the two sometimes go to a nearby bar and talk about books and records. Itoh favors French novels, especially those by Georges Bataille and Boris Vian, while his musical preferences include Mozart and Ravel. Like Watanabe, he wants a friend with whom he can discuss these interests.

Art, Home, and Conversation

Itoh invites Watanabe to his flat, a one-storey house behind Inokashira Park. The room is crowded with painting supplies and canvases. When Watanabe asks to see his work, Itoh is too embarrassed to show it, revealing a private reserve beneath the confident tastes he brings to their conversations.

The visit settles into a shared evening rather than an exchange of artistic credentials. Itoh has quietly taken Chivas Regal from his father’s home; he and Watanabe drink it while grilling smelts on a charcoal stove and listening to Robert Casadesus perform a Mozart piano concerto. The scene gives their friendship its most concrete form: food, drink, music, and attentive company in a room filled with the work Itoh is not yet ready to reveal.

Itoh’s feeling for Mozart is rooted in childhood. His father loved the music and introduced it to him when he was very young. Itoh knows Mozart intimately, like a country boy who knows the paths through his mountains. As he comments on the concerto in hushed tones, Watanabe listens to music he does not know as well and feels himself calming down. They finish the whisky while looking at the crescent moon over Inokashira Park.

Personal Life and Narrative Role

Itoh tells Watanabe that he comes from Nagasaki and has a girlfriend there whom he sleeps with when he goes home. Their relationship has recently been going badly. He complains that as women reach twenty or twenty-one, they acquire practical ideas about the future; after sex, his girlfriend asks what he intends to do after graduation. His account shows a mismatch between his wish to preserve a sweet, uncomplicated intimacy and her demand for a concrete answer about their lives.

The novel gives little further information about Itoh’s relationship or his future, and he does not become a major participant in Watanabe’s later decisions. His role is instead concentrated in a brief friendship formed around shared cultural interests. During Watanabe’s isolation, their conversations and the evening at Itoh’s home make connection possible without requiring either man to explain or resolve the larger troubles surrounding him. Music offers a temporary steadiness: not an answer to grief, but a change in its pressure.