Today, Murakami is considered one of the most prominent Japanese and world novelists. His novels are published in several languages, and garner audiences, awards, and cultural pages. Each Murakami novel is an event.
"Norwegian Forest" is one of Murakami's most famous books, in which he tells the story of a college young man whose friend dies, so he lives death as a joint of life, and his life turns into sexual fantasies, and discovers that the boundaries between things fall apart and reality mixes with fantasy, death with life and reason with madness.
When Watanabe, the protagonist of the novel, writes about his Achilles Forest, twenty years after its occurrence, he finds that what he writes is what he remembers, and what he remembers is what he desires. This is how he lives the experience of the mental institution as a narrative heritage that extends from Scheherazade to the "magic mountain" of Thomas Mann, the novel that tells the story of another mental institution. Narration is life, and life is narrative. But the result that afflicts his actual presence in this intertwining, is that in his regression in this self-chance, he lost the "border" between the worlds. He no longer knows where he is, collides with the fragility of actual reality, and we readers are shocked with it, with the intertwining of the boundaries between narrative and reality, awareness and subconsciousness