The Norwegian forest

Murakami is considered today one of the most prominent novelists of Japan and the world. His novels are published in multiple languages, garnering audiences, awards, and cultural pages. Every novel by Murakami is an event. "Norwegian Wood" is among his most famous works, in which he tells the story of a university student whose friend dies, living death as a part of life, and his life turns into sexual fantasies. He discovers that the boundaries between things collapse, and reality blends with imagination, death with life, and reason with madness. When Atanabi, the protagonist, writes the forest of his imagination, twenty years after its occurrence, he finds that what he writes is what he remembers, and what he remembers is what he desires. 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, a novel that tells the story of another mental hospital. The narration is life, and life is narration. But the result that truly sweeps over his existence in this intertwining is that in his retreat into this self-phenomenon, he has lost the "boundaries" between worlds. He no longer knows where he is, crashing into the fragility of actual reality, and we, the readers, are shocked with him, with the overlapping boundaries between narration and reality, consciousness and unconsciousness.