Short version: Goman to Zenryo (“Arrogance and Goodness”) is not a book that leaves you feeling better. It is set around arranged dating and marriage, and it exists to show you the moment a judgment you consider decent turns into sizing another person up.
I could not talk about it right after finishing. “Did I enjoy it” is not a question the book answers, because it kept turning me back toward myself while I read.
I read it less as a romance or a novel about marriage than as a novel about how people look at each other, and about the arrogance you cannot see in yourself. This article covers the themes that hit hardest, so you can decide whether it suits you.
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What kind of novel is it?
It opens with a woman disappearing without a word, shortly after becoming engaged to a man she met through a matchmaking app.
| Title | Goman to Zenryo (Arrogance and Goodness) |
|---|---|
| Author | Mizuki Tsujimura |
| First published | March 5, 2019, Asahi Shimbun Publications (416 pages) |
| Paperback | September 7, 2022, Asahi Bunko |
| Awards | 7th Booklog Grand Prize, Fiction category (2019); Utsunomiya Grand Prize (2020) |
| Sales | Over 1 million copies as of October 2024 |
| Film | Released September 27, 2024 (director Kentaro Hagiwara; starring Taisuke Fujigaya and Nao) |
The fiancee, Mami Sakaniwa, vanishes without telling anyone, and Kaname Nishizawa sets out to find her. I read the Asahi Bunko paperback edition.
Summarized as “a man searches for his missing fiancee”, it sounds like a mystery. It does not read like one. Rather than solving a case, the book traces the environment Mami grew up in and the choices she was pushed into making.
Criteria I read it against
- How close the characters’ emotional movements are to real experience
- Whether reading it drags up my own past and assumptions
- Whether it leaves an aftertaste that resists being tidied into a conclusion
I was reading less for the story’s answer than for whether it makes me ask “what would I have felt?” and “how have I actually behaved?” Everything below follows from that.
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Knowing the premise does not prepare you for the experience
The weight sits on how things feel, not on what happens.
There is no cascade of dramatic events. And yet the characters’ words and choices keep catching.
As I read, I moved back and forth between “I can see why they feel that” and “but isn’t that a little arrogant?” That oscillation is the reading experience.
The matchmaking setting does a lot of work here. Listing conditions and choosing a partner sits on a direct continuum with appraising a person, so the reader is kept from settling on whether any given judgment is reasonable or arrogant.
Arrogance and goodness live in the same person
The two words in the title are not a division between bad and good.
The characters are fundamentally serious people, presented as socially respectable. That is exactly why behavior they consider decent can be hurting someone, or placing them in the position of the one who selects. The reader notices before the characters do.
What stayed with me most was the moment when “I assumed I was the one being chosen” and “I thought I was assessing them” quietly becomes looking down on someone.
That applied to my own past, not just to the characters, and it made for genuinely uncomfortable reading. The discomfort is the point.
On the difficulty of living up to what is around you, it overlaps with Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman. The difference is the vantage point: Convenience Store Woman writes from outside normality, while this book writes about the blindness of the people standing inside it.
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Not being able to identify with the characters is fine
This is not a novel that invites full identification. “I could not relate to them” is a common reaction, and it was partly mine.
That is a feature rather than a flaw. The characters are neither ideal nor especially perceptive; they are narrow at times, and desperate to protect their own position. They are vivid enough that some readers will push back against them.
Reading at the distance of “I want to understand them, and I cannot fully” is what brought the theme into focus for me. Agreeing with everyone is not the way through this book.
What remains is a question, not an answer
No tidy resolution is offered. Start asking “what would have been the right thing” or “who was at fault” and the structure refuses to settle.
What remains instead is: how have I looked at other people, and were the judgments I considered decent actually decent?
Whether that aftertaste feels rewarding or simply heavy is where opinions on this book divide.
Who it suits
| A good fit | Better left for another time |
|---|---|
| Readers who want love and marriage written without sentimentality | Readers looking for comfort or catharsis |
| Readers willing to sit with immaturity and weakness | Readers who want a clear payoff |
| Readers open to reexamining their own choices | Readers who need to identify with a protagonist |
| Anyone familiar with social pressure around marriage | Anyone currently low |
At 416 pages it is substantial, but never hard to read. When you stop, it is not the prose — it is recognizing yourself on the page.
Verdict: recommended, with conditions
I would recommend it — not as something that lifts your mood.
If you like fiction about weakness and immaturity, or want a reading experience that quietly unsettles your assumptions, it can land hard.
If you are reading for comfort right now, it will feel heavy. Check it against your own state of mind before picking it up.
For another novel that refuses to hand you a clean answer, I also wrote about Haruo Yuki’s Hakobune.
Summary
- Goman to Zenryo is a novel by Mizuki Tsujimura (2019, Asahi Shimbun Publications; 2022 paperback)
- It starts with a disappearance but is about values, not a mystery to be solved
- Arrogance and goodness are not opposites; they coexist in the same person
- The matchmaking setting makes appraising people literally visible
- Not identifying with the characters is fine — distance makes the theme clearer
- What remains is “how have I behaved?”, not a resolution
- Not a book for when you want comfort. Read it when you have the energy
