Noburo Nisamata

Noburo Nisamata, known to Hugo Halder and Hans Reiter as Nisa, is a Japanese assistant at the Japanese legation in Berlin and an important member of the friendship that shapes Hans’s early life in the city. The novel presents him through a striking combination of social ease, exuberant laughter, and enigmatic remarks: he can enliven a night out or collapse in laughter at an unexpected question, yet he also shares with Halder and Hans stretches of silence that seem to suspend ordinary time. His presence makes the trio’s Berlin life both comic and companionable, while the friends’ unceremonious separation from Hans complicates that warmth.

Identity and Place in the Circle

Nisa is twenty-eight and works as assistant to the charge of agricultural affairs at the Japanese legation. His best friend besides Hans is Halder, whom Hans visits regularly after taking a night-watchman’s job at a factory. The three meet in Berlin rather than in any formal setting: they eat, talk, and move between cafés and cabarets, with Nisa joining the pair after they have already arrived at the Stone Virgin Cafe near Alexanderplatz.

He is described as good-natured, ready to laugh at innocent jokes, and willing to listen to even the most outrageous ideas. He is also impeccably dressed and usually speaks little. The narrative leaves open whether his reserve comes from discretion or from reluctance to offend through his heavily accented German. That silence does not make him a passive figure: when he does speak, his observations are memorable, and his response to Halder’s teasing gives the friendship much of its visible energy.

Nights Out with Halder and Hans

After a modest meal, the friends leave the Stone Virgin Cafe in a hurry and lose themselves in Berlin’s night. Halder generally takes the lead, bringing them first to the Eclipse, a cheap cabaret whose performers are conspicuously unsuccessful. The venue’s failures are part of its appeal: if the group secures a secluded table through a waiter Halder knows, they can talk without much interruption. Nisa, not Halder, usually pays for these nights.

From there they go to the Cafe des Artistes, where Nisa enjoys sharing a table with people from the art world whom Halder has known for years. Later they head to the Danube, a more fashionable cabaret where the doorman or maître d’ sometimes resists admitting Hans because his poor clothes fail to meet the dress code. The sequence gives the trio’s friendship a distinctly social geography, moving from an inexpensive room where conversation is possible to venues where access depends on money, connections, or appearance. Nisa’s generosity helps sustain these outings, while Halder’s acquaintance with artists and other Berlin figures provides their route through the city.

The revelry exists alongside Hans’s work schedule. On weekdays, he leaves his friends at ten so he can catch the tram to his night shift at the factory. When the weather is good, the men also spend hours on fashionable restaurant terraces discussing Halder’s inventions. Halder claims he will patent them and make his fortune when he has time; Nisa answers these promises with laughter so intense that it seems to involve his whole body, not merely his face or voice.

Humor, Remarks, and Silence

Nisa’s laughter becomes especially striking when Halder suddenly asks whether his official mission in Germany is genuine or whether he is secretly an agent. At first Nisa does not fully understand the question. Once Halder explains what he means by a secret agent, Nisa laughs so hard that he faints onto the table. Hans and Halder carry him to the washroom, splash water on his face, and revive him. The episode turns Halder’s playful suspicion into a comic physical reversal: the person challenged by the question cannot answer it directly because laughter overtakes him.

Nisa’s occasional statements offer a different kind of surprise. He describes Zen as a mountain biting its own tail, says that he studied English and that his assignment to Berlin was one of the ministry’s mistakes, and compares samurai to fish in a waterfall. He adds that the best samurai in history was a woman. He also recounts that his father knew a Christian monk who lived for fifteen years without leaving Endo, a waterless island of volcanic rock a few miles from Okinawa. These remarks range from personal information to compressed, puzzling images; the narrative does not resolve them into a single explanation of Nisa’s character.

Halder, in turn, provokes him with claims that Nisa is a Shintoist, likes only German prostitutes, and can speak and write a long list of languages beyond German and English. Nisa responds with a slower, quieter laugh and shows Hans his teeth, his eyes shining. Their teasing is not presented as a settled portrait of Nisa so much as a shared game, with Halder making extravagant assertions and Nisa answering without breaking the friendly rhythm.

The trio’s nights are not always loud. Sometimes, on a café terrace or around a dark cabaret table, an inexplicable silence descends. The three seem to freeze and lose their sense of time, withdrawing from everyday life, other people, and conversation into an inward interval. Afterward they return to talk of inventions, women, Finnish philology, and highways across the Reich. The abrupt movement from silence back to ordinary subjects makes their friendship feel less like uninterrupted merriment than a bond with its own pauses and private rhythms.

Hans’s Departure and Nisa’s Narrative Role

A week before Hans is due to leave for basic training, Halder and Nisa take him to a farewell dinner that ends at a brothel. They urge him to lose his virginity in honor of their friendship. Hans does not do so that night, although he tells them that he has; he returns the next day and later makes further visits. The episode marks a transition in Hans’s life, but Nisa’s part in it remains that of a friend participating in Halder’s plan rather than the focus of the encounter.

When Hans finally leaves, he goes alone. He notices that no one has come to the station to see him off. He said goodbye to Anita the previous night, but has heard nothing from either Halder or Nisa since his first visit to the brothel. He thinks that Halder has been living in Berlin as if he had already left. The passage does not explain why the two friends are absent, or establish that they knowingly refuse to say goodbye. It instead places the warmth of the farewell outing beside the fact of Hans’s solitary departure, leaving their closeness marked by an abrupt and unexplained gap.

Nisa’s narrative significance lies in this combination of social presence and incomplete knowledge. He helps create the lively Berlin circle that Hans inhabits, pays for nights out, listens to Halder’s schemes, and contributes images that linger beyond their casual delivery. Yet the narrative offers no account of what becomes of him after Hans leaves. His last appearance in the supplied sequence belongs to the farewell that does not secure a farewell at the station: a friend who has been central to Hans’s evenings is absent at the moment those evenings end.