CHARACTER
Confessionsby Kanae Minato

Naoki Shitamura

Naoki Shitamura

Quick Facts

  • Role: Middle school accomplice who ultimately kills Manami Moriguchi
  • First appearance: The classroom “confession” that sets the story in motion
  • Key relationships: Classmate and manipulator Shūya Watanabe; homeroom teacher Yūko Moriguchi; his overbearing mother; victim Manami

Who They Are

Bold on the surface yet hollow at the core, Naoki Shitamura is the second, more impressionable half of a lethal partnership. While Shūya masterminds, Naoki acts—the one who physically drowns Manami. His arc is less a development than a collapse: a boy hungry for approval who, when pushed by Yūko’s revenge, caves inward until only paranoia and violence remain. Through Naoki, the novel interrogates Guilt and Atonement and the claustrophobia of Motherhood and Family Dysfunction, asking how weakness, coddling, and shame can curdle into cruelty.

Personality & Traits

Naoki’s personality is defined by brittleness—he absorbs others’ judgments and then reshapes himself around them. Unlike Shūya’s cool, detached cruelty, Naoki acts from raw emotion: fear of being called a “failure,” jealousy of status, and a terrified need to be seen as “cool.” After the murder, these same insecurities metastasize into obsessive rituals and violent outbursts, revealing a boy who cannot live with what he’s done—or with who he is.

  • Insecure and impressionable: He quits the tennis club when embarrassed, then clings to Shūya’s flattery, following his plans to feel worthy of a “cool” friend.
  • Emotionally fragile: He internalizes Yūko’s HIV lie, spiraling into panic and magical thinking; his paranoia—“they’re watching me”—makes ordinary authority feel lethal.
  • Weak-willed sweetness: His mother calls him a “sweet boy,” but his “niceness” is passivity—he allows Shūya to define right and wrong, then seeks validation by going a step further.
  • Obsessive and paranoid: After the murder, he scrubs dishes, clothes, and the toilet compulsively as if he can scour his guilt, while letting his own body rot—a split between public purity and private filth.
  • Violent when cornered: He begins with thrown objects and ends with matricide, the word “failure” detonating his simmering shame into bloodshed.

Physical Transformation

Naoki’s breakdown writes itself on his body. As a hikikomori, he stops bathing, his hair slick and crusted with dandruff, nails “embarrassingly long,” pimples inflamed from grime, and a “sour” smell announcing the neglect. Then, abruptly, he shaves his head and emerges “completely expressionless,” like a monk who has cast off worldly worries—an eerie, performative purity that mirrors his hollowed psyche.

Character Journey

Naoki begins as an ordinary, insecure student who wants to belong. Shūya’s attention becomes a lifeline; to keep it, Naoki suggests Manami as their target and then, when Shūya’s device only knocks her out, chooses to “succeed” where his friend “failed.” Yūko’s classroom revelation—that the milk was HIV-infected—buries him under dread. Convinced he is doomed, he retreats into his room and into rituals, scrubbing his surroundings clean while letting his body fester. His mother’s diary records the descent: coddling, denial, and an anxious love that only deepens his isolation. When Naoki finally admits he deliberately drowned Manami to prove he wasn’t a failure, the fragile story he’s told himself snaps. Faced with his mother’s pitying “I’m sorry I failed you,” he erupts, kills her, and then disassociates so thoroughly that he watches his life as if it were a film about a “stupid kid,” no longer recognizing himself.

Key Relationships

  • Naoki’s Mother: The most formative, destructive bond in his life. Her indulgent denial—insisting on her “sweet boy”—enables his isolation and shields him from consequences. When she frames his life through the word he most fears, “failure,” her love becomes the trigger for his most unforgivable act.

  • Shūya Watanabe: Naoki venerates Shūya’s intelligence and poise, mistaking manipulation for friendship. Being branded a “failure” by Shūya becomes Naoki’s obsession, so he “proves” himself by turning a prank into murder, a competitive one-upmanship that exposes how status hunger can warp morality.

  • Yūko Moriguchi: First just his teacher, she becomes the architect of his undoing. Her tailored revenge—the HIV lie—weaponizes Naoki’s fear and guilt, catalyzing his hikikomori isolation and accelerating his slide into obsessive cleansing and paranoid collapse.

  • Manami Moriguchi: More symbol than peer in Naoki’s mind, Manami becomes the canvas for his need to “succeed.” When she opens her eyes in his arms, his choice to drown her is both an assertion of agency and a surrender to his worst fear: being worthless unless he commits something irreversible.

Defining Moments

Naoki’s story is punctuated by choices that seem small—or are framed as pranks—until they irreversibly redefine him.

  • Suggesting Manami as the target: Eager to impress Shūya, Naoki offers Manami for their “prank.” Why it matters: It reveals that Naoki isn’t only led—he initiates, aligning himself with harm to secure belonging.
  • The murder at the pool: When Shūya’s device merely knocks Manami out, Naoki, haunted by the word “failure,” throws her into the water. Why it matters: This is the pivot from insecurity to violence; Naoki chooses lethality to prove worth.
  • Yūko’s HIV “confession”: Convinced he’s infected, Naoki collapses into ritual and fear. Why it matters: His guilt becomes embodied; he seeks purification through cleaning while letting himself decay.
  • Confession to his mother: He admits he killed Manami intentionally after she regained consciousness. Why it matters: He abandons the self-protective lie of “accident,” but the truth doesn’t redeem him—it shatters him.
  • Killing his mother: Her “I’m sorry I failed you” triggers his deepest shame; he stabs her, and she dies falling down the stairs. Why it matters: The word that ruled his life destroys it, turning dependence into annihilation.

Symbols & Motifs

Naoki embodies the danger of weakness weaponized. He isn’t the calculating brilliance of Shūya; he is a more primal, pathetic evil born of insecurity and need. His obsessive cleaning versus personal filth stages his inner war: a desperate wish to wash away guilt paired with a self-punishing belief that he deserves squalor. The gap between who his mother believes he is and who he becomes sharpens the novel’s Perception vs. Reality theme, where love, denial, and fear blur—and finally obliterate—the truth.

Essential Quotes

She opened her eyes while I was standing there holding her. And then I dropped her in and let her drown.

This confession strips away the “prank” façade: Naoki is not an unlucky bystander but the agent of Manami’s death. The simplicity of the diction—“dropped her in”—heightens the horror, presenting murder as a stark, almost mechanical choice.

I had succeeded where Watanabe had failed.

“Success” reframed as murder exposes Naoki’s value system: worth equals winning, even if the contest is cruelty. The line fuses envy, admiration, and self-loathing into a single, chilling metric.

I’m sorry I failed you. Failed you. Failed. Failure! Fail, fail, fail, fail, fail fail fail fail fail fail.… Something hot splashed on my face. Blood, blood, blood. Mother’s blood.… Did I stab her?

The repetition enacts the echo chamber of Naoki’s mind, where one word reverberates into violence. His dissociative question—“Did I stab her?”—shows a psyche fleeing accountability at the instant of action.

But who’s the stupid kid who keeps showing up here? And why do I know exactly what he’s thinking? And then there’s that girl who says she’s my sister. She was calling to me from outside the door. “Naoki, you didn’t do anything. It’s all a bad dream,” she said.

Here, Naoki narrates his life as if watching a film, splitting himself into viewer and character. The comforting voice outside the door underscores his retreat from reality and his craving to be absolved, even if it requires denying the truth.