The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is a repeatedly reread novel and a rare point of connection for Toru Watanabe in his first year at the dormitory. At eighteen, Watanabe gives it pride of place among his favorite books; his attachment is both intimate and social, a source of private pleasure that eventually brings him into friendship with Nagasawa. The novel’s significance lies not in a plot summary within the plot, but in how its readers use it to recognize one another—and in how differently each man turns that recognition into a way of judging the world.

A private reading life

Watanabe’s attachment to The Great Gatsby grows out of a narrow but deep reading habit. He returns to favorite writers rather than ranging widely, reading Truman Capote, John Updike, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Raymond Chandler. The preferences of his classmates run elsewhere: in his lectures and dormitory, he sees readers of Kazumi Takahashi, Kenzaburo Oe, Yukio Mishima, and contemporary French novelists, but no one who shares his literary tastes. This difference gives him another reason to keep to himself and his books.

Reading is presented as a bodily, familiar act as well as an intellectual one. Watanabe closes his eyes, touches a book he knows, and draws in its fragrance; the remembered object and its scent are enough to make him happy. Against that intimate solitude, his wish to tell other people what a wonderful novel The Great Gatsby is remains largely unfulfilled. No one around him has read it or seems likely to, and urging people to read Fitzgerald in 1968 does not feel like an available social gesture. The book is cherished, but its value is difficult to share.

From The Centaur to Fitzgerald

At eighteen, Watanabe’s favorite book is John Updike’s The Centaur. After reading it several times, however, he finds that its first brilliance has begun to fade. The Great Gatsby takes its place and holds first rank for a long time. Watanabe does not need to read the novel in sequence: when the mood strikes, he pulls it from the shelf and opens to a section at random. That freedom of return matters. He finds no boring page and is never disappointed, so the novel becomes something he can enter again and again rather than a book exhausted by a single reading.

The change in favorite book is not described as a rejection of The Centaur, but as a shift in the experience of rereading. One work loses some of its initial luster; Fitzgerald’s novel continues to reward renewed attention. Watanabe’s claim that each return yields something he likes even more suggests a reading relationship in which familiarity does not close interpretation down. The same pages can disclose fresh pleasure, making the book a steady private resource while his relations with people around him remain sparse.

The encounter with Nagasawa

The novel becomes a social link in October, when Watanabe finally meets someone in his world who has read it. Until then, he and Nagasawa, a fellow resident of the dormitory, know one another only by sight. One day Watanabe is reading in a sunny spot in the dining hall when Nagasawa sits beside him and asks what the book is. Watanabe says that this is his third time through it and that each reading brings a new thing he likes even more than before.

Nagasawa responds as though the shared reading settles the question of friendship: “Well, any friend of Gatsby is a friend of mine.” Watanabe accepts the overture, and they become friends. The scene turns an object of solitary pleasure into a social password. Yet the bond begins not with an extended account of the novel’s meaning, but with the fact of having read and returned to it. The book makes recognition possible before either man has fully disclosed what kind of person he is.

A shared book, different judgments

Nagasawa’s enthusiasm for Fitzgerald also reveals his own cultivated contrariness. He claims to trust only books by authors who have been dead for at least thirty years and favors writers such as Balzac, Dante, Joseph Conrad, and Dickens. His rule has an immediate inconsistency: Fitzgerald has been dead only twenty-eight years. Watanabe points this out, and Nagasawa brushes the discrepancy aside by treating Fitzgerald as an exception. The novel’s place in their friendship therefore precedes Nagasawa’s rule and survives its neat arithmetic.

Nagasawa explains his preference for older writers by arguing that reading what everyone else reads limits a person to thinking what everyone else thinks. He calls himself and Watanabe the only “real ones” in the dormitory, and invokes their shared reading as evidence of a special affinity. For Watanabe, however, The Great Gatsby is not chiefly a certificate of superiority. He has wanted to share his delight because the book never disappoints him; the loneliness of that desire makes the dining-hall encounter meaningful. Nagasawa turns the same common taste into a distinction between an elect pair and the people he dismisses.

That difference gives the novel a double function in the episode. It genuinely connects two readers who had previously known one another only by sight, while also exposing how differently they understand literary distinction. Watanabe’s repeated readings deepen a private attachment; Nagasawa makes shared reading part of a theory about who deserves respect. The friendship begins in an authentic point of recognition, but the book’s role in it is already divided between companionship and exclusion.