Tokyo University

Tokyo University is the prestigious university attended by Nagasawa, where his legal studies place him on a path toward national leadership and a career in the Foreign Ministry. In the novel, it is both a concrete source of his social authority and a measure of the gulf between his prospects and Toru Watanabe’s.

Nagasawa’s University and Prospects

Nagasawa is two years older than Watanabe and studies law at Tokyo University. His place there belongs to a larger, clearly anticipated trajectory: he earns good marks, plans to take the Civil Service Exam, and expects to join the Foreign Ministry as a diplomat. The university is not just a setting for his education; it is one step in a route toward public power that other students can readily recognize.

That authority is reinforced by the respect he commands in the dormitory. Nagasawa comes from a wealthy family, carries ample money, and has a bearing that leads people—including the dorm head—to comply when he gives instructions. His association with Tokyo University thus accords with a reputation already sustained by money, academic achievement, and force of personality.

Friendship Through Literature

The novel introduces the connection between Tokyo University and Watanabe through an unexpected point of contact. Watanabe is reading The Great Gatsby in a sunny spot in the dormitory dining hall when Nagasawa sits beside him and asks about the book. Watanabe says that it is his third reading and that each time he finds something new to like. Nagasawa recognizes a fellow reader, and the two become friends in October.

The friendship complicates the image of Nagasawa as simply a privileged student on a predetermined career track: he privately reads classic novels, though this is not generally known in the dorm. Watanabe is surprised that Nagasawa chooses him, a student without comparable distinction. He understands the choice partly through contrast: unlike others, he does not defer to Nagasawa’s grades, looks, or commanding presence, and is instead interested in the complexity of his character.

A Measure of Distance

In a later exchange, Watanabe names the inequalities between them. He says he could never enter Tokyo University, is not admired as Nagasawa is, and expects no doors to open for him after graduating with a literature degree from a second-rate private university. These remarks make the university a shorthand for opportunity and status, but Watanabe rejects the idea that this means he envies Nagasawa’s life. He says he is too accustomed to being himself and does not care about Tokyo University or the Foreign Ministry.

That refusal does not erase the contrast; it defines it. Tokyo University represents a recognizable institutional route to influence that Nagasawa can follow and Watanabe cannot, while their friendship begins not in shared status but in a shared book. The university’s significance therefore lies as much in what it separates as in what it offers: it frames Nagasawa’s ascent, gives Watanabe a language for their unequal prospects, and remains secondary to the personal curiosity that binds them.