NodeJS is only faster for a small subset of things and then you also have to specify faster than what - in Java you have many options for serving data, either via Servlet-type options (in which case you also need to specify which servlet specification since the latest servlet specification can also do non-blocking reactive-type serving which should be on par with NodeJS), are we looking at VertX or what about Quasars and what about Scala actors which also compiles to Java byte-code. I suspect many of those options will give you the same performance as NodeJS for serving non-blocking data from a database.
NodeJS has the advantage with REGEX due to JavaScript being a dynamic language, Groovy (compiled to Java-bytecode) might be a contender here.
With regards to computation, the JVM is a lot faster than NodeJS according to these benchmarks which runs several computation-heavy loads on both NodeJS V6.2.1 and Java V1.8.0_92
The source-code for those benchmarks are available if you want to try and improve it.
In the end, it's about comparing apples to apples, having an event-loop type architecture is simply better and faster for serving non-blocking data in both Java and NodeJS