Nagasawa

Nagasawa is a high-achieving Tokyo University student and Watanabe’s dormitory friend, introduced through their shared attachment to The Great Gatsby. He is both an exacting reader and an ambitious future bureaucrat, both generous to Watanabe and capable of cruelty. The contradiction is central to his significance: his candor makes him legible, but does not make him safe to trust.

Identity and Background

Nagasawa is two years older than Watanabe and studies law at Tokyo University. He comes from a wealthy family: his father owns a large hospital in Nagoya, and his brother, a Tokyo University graduate who went on to medical school, is expected to inherit it. Nagasawa himself is already marked out for a different kind of ascent. He earns good marks, plans to take the civil-service examination and enter the Foreign Ministry, and carries enough money and authority to command respect in the dormitory, including from its head.

His social power is presented as more than a matter of wealth or credentials. He can read a situation, issue precise and tactful instructions, and get people to follow them. Watanabe describes an almost visible aura of superiority around him, which makes it all the more striking that Nagasawa chooses as a close friend someone without comparable distinction. Watanabe’s explanation is that he does not flatter Nagasawa or admire his looks, grades, or status. His interest lies instead in Nagasawa’s complexity, a response that seems new to the older student.

Friendship with Watanabe

The friendship begins in October, in the dormitory dining hall. Watanabe is reading The Great Gatsby in a sunny spot when Nagasawa sits beside him and asks about the book. Watanabe says it is his third reading and that each time he finds something new to like. Nagasawa responds that anyone who is a friend of Gatsby is a friend of his. Their literary recognition of one another turns an acquaintance by sight into a friendship.

Their tastes also disclose a striking difference in temperament. Watanabe rereads favorite books, finding comfort in their familiarity; Nagasawa reads more voraciously but follows a rule against reading authors who have been dead for fewer than thirty years. He trusts books that have survived what he calls the baptism of time, insisting that life is too short to spend on work not yet tested by history. When Watanabe points out that Fitzgerald had been dead for only twenty-eight years, Nagasawa dismisses the gap as negligible. His rule is serious, but his exception shows that even his principles can bend around a writer he admires.

For Watanabe, the friendship is useful as well as intellectually engaging. Nagasawa is kind and supportive toward him, and Watanabe recognizes that life in the dormitory would have been much more difficult without that support. Yet he never opens his heart to Nagasawa. The limit is deliberate: after seeing Nagasawa drunk and tormenting a girl, Watanabe promises himself never to make himself vulnerable to him. His relationship with Nagasawa therefore stands in contrast to his bond with Kizuki, a friendship in which emotional openness was possible.

Ambition and Moral Contradictions

Nagasawa’s plan to enter the Foreign Ministry is driven chiefly by a desire to test his abilities. He wants to work overseas, but more importantly to measure how high he can climb and how much power he can exercise within what he calls an immense bureaucratic system. He treats the nation as the largest available field for his personal experiment. When Watanabe says this sounds like a game, the description captures the cool, competitive cast of Nagasawa’s ambition.

His stated ideal is unexpectedly modest in sound: when asked why he is pursuing his path, he says it is “To be a gentleman.” The answer nearly makes Watanabe fall off his chair. That ideal sits uneasily beside Nagasawa’s contempt for other aspiring bureaucrats, whom he dismisses as mostly unworthy and barely able to read, and beside his willingness to exploit other people. He is not presented as unaware of the contradiction. Rather, the gap between the gentlemanly aspiration and the behavior is one of the defining tensions in his character.

Watanabe sees Nagasawa as a person of extreme opposites. He can be kind enough to move him, then malicious and cruel; he can appear elevated and commanding while behaving like a man of the gutter. His forward-driving confidence coexists with what Watanabe understands as a deep loneliness. The narrator calls this combination a private hell. Nagasawa is not simply a charismatic success or a single-minded villain: his contradictions are visible from the outset, even when those around him mostly see his ability and authority.

Sexual Conduct and Candor

Dormitory stories exaggerate Nagasawa’s sexual reputation into legend, including a tale that he has slept with more than a hundred women. Watanabe later estimates the number at about eighty. When he explains Nagasawa to Naoko, he describes the increasing number of encounters as making each individual act seem to mean less, perhaps the very result Nagasawa seeks. Naoko finds it strange that Watanabe calls him stoic while speaking of his promiscuity. The exchange shows how difficult it is to fit Nagasawa’s conduct into a stable moral description.

Nagasawa’s relationship with Hatsumi sharpens that difficulty. He tells Watanabe that the world is inherently unfair and that he has never deceived Hatsumi: she knows what sort of man he is and can leave when she decides she can no longer tolerate him. He says he told her this plainly from the beginning. His argument offers honesty as a defense, but it does not erase the harm or imbalance implied by his behavior. His candor can expose his shortcomings without compelling him to change them.

Watanabe’s judgment is consequently divided. Nagasawa’s greatest virtue, in his view, is honesty: he does not lie about his failings or conceal facts that might embarrass him, and he is unfailingly supportive toward Watanabe. But that very honesty cannot substitute for intimacy or moral trust. Watanabe can acknowledge Nagasawa’s kindness and still refuse to entrust him with his inner life.

Career and Narrative Role

Nagasawa passes the Foreign Ministry examination, formally titled the Foreign Affairs Public Service Personnel First Class Service Examination. When he tells Watanabe the results have been posted and that he has passed, the achievement confirms the career he had described as a contest with the largest system of power. His success is a concrete step toward the diplomatic future for which his education, confidence, and family position have prepared him.

After a dinner intended to celebrate his first job becomes unpleasant, Nagasawa later sits beside Watanabe in the dining hall with a tray of food and apologizes for having made their “party” so uncomfortable. The apology does not resolve their deeper differences, but it echoes the pattern that makes their friendship possible: Nagasawa can behave badly, recognize the fact, and offer a direct acknowledgment afterward. Watanabe remains close enough to receive his support, yet guarded against the vulnerability that closeness might otherwise invite.

In the novel’s recollections, Nagasawa serves as a counterpoint to Watanabe’s inward reserve. His authority, ambition, and appetite for experience make him a forceful presence in the dormitory, while his loneliness and compromised idealism prevent success from reading as simple fulfillment. The shared book that begins his friendship with Watanabe offers a lasting point of connection, but not proof of shared values. Their bond rests on recognition and practical loyalty, held in tension with Watanabe’s clear-eyed refusal to confuse Nagasawa’s honesty with trustworthiness.