The Norwegian Forest - Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami is considered today one of the most prominent novelists of Japan and the world. His novels are published in several languages, garnering audiences, awards, and cultural pages. Every novel by Murakami is an event. "Norwegian Wood" is one of his most famous works, in which he tells the story of a university student whose friend dies, and he lives death as a joint of life, and his life turns into sexual illusions, and he discovers that the boundaries between things collapse, and reality mixes with imagination, death with life, and reason with madness. When Atanabi, the protagonist of the novel, writes the forest of his illusions, twenty years after its occurrence, he finds that what he writes is what he remembers, and what he remembers is what he wishes. Thus, he lives the experience of the mental hospital as if it were a narrative heritage extending from Scheherazade to "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann, that novel which tells the story of another mental hospital. The narration is life, and life is narration. But the result that truly sweeps his existence in this overlap is that in his retreat into this self-accident, he lost the "boundaries" between worlds. He no longer knows where he is, colliding with the fragility of actual reality, and we, the readers, are shocked with him, with the overlapping boundaries between narration and reality, consciousness and unconsciousness. Pages: 398 Publisher: Arab Cultural Center Author: Haruki Murakami