Edition note: Independently rewritten for English-language readers from the Chinese essay’s argument and close reading. Full-book spoilers.

A Code That Works

Nagasawa has every advantage and uses it well: wealth, Tokyo University law, intelligence, discipline, and entry into the Foreign Ministry. He is the only major character whose path works from beginning to end.

He also explains his rules without disguise. He reads only writers dead for thirty years because time has not yet tested the living. He considers self-pity contemptible. He sleeps with scores of women and keeps count. He tells his girlfriend Hatsumi that loving her and having sex with others are separate facts; marriage would not change him.

Nothing is hidden. The terms are available before the injury. This apparent honesty becomes its own closure. Hatsumi cannot expose a deception because there is none. She can accept or leave, and she accepts for years.

Later Nagasawa goes to Germany. Hatsumi marries someone else, then dies by suicide. Watanabe ends his friendship with Nagasawa.

Honesty has not protected the person most honestly addressed. It has protected the speaker from the claim that he misrepresented himself. A relation is not made mutual merely because one party publishes the rules under which he will use it.

The available choice—accept or leave—sounds like freedom, but it leaves the terms untouched. Hatsumi is never allowed to help decide the rules by which her life is being used.

What Cannot Be Counted

Nagasawa is not simply cruel. He is loyal in friendship, helps Watanabe, keeps promises, and does not cheat in ordinary dealings. His central habit is to make people countable without feeling contradiction. Affection for Hatsumi occupies one account; other women occupy another; ambition remains untouched by either.

The method is effective. Diplomatic institutions reward a person who is capable, steady, and unwilling to let private entanglements interrupt public work. Nagasawa pays an internal price in advance: he stores away whatever would allow another person’s suffering to revise the system.

He believes Watanabe is the same kind of man because neither expects the world to give him anything. He is only half right. Watanabe follows him on some nights but stops. More importantly, Watanabe cannot separate body, attachment, memory, and debt into clean columns. He remains bound to Naoko long after calculation would recommend departure.

This does not automatically make Watanabe morally superior. His inability to choose also hurts Midori. The difference is not goodness but what each man permits another person to alter.

After Hatsumi’s death, Watanabe remembers the nameless longing she awakened in him—something from childhood, useless for advancement and impossible to quantify. He realizes that he had once relinquished it.

Nagasawa’s world can account for every visible decision except the longing Hatsumi awakened in another person. She bears the cost of the system’s accuracy, while Watanabe’s grief begins where its categories end.

Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, first published in 1987. Full-book spoilers.