Norwegian Wood

Description

Norwegian Wood, the Japanese novel that sold millions of copies and spread throughout the world, is a tale of successive disappointments where fantasy and reality, death and life, sanity and madness intertwine.

A university student loses his friend and soulmate, deciding to embrace death as a fundamental aspect of life. However, unknowingly, he discovers that his entire life has transformed into a series of recurring sexual fantasies, blurring the lines between reality and imagination. He discovers that the boundaries between things in the external world are collapsing, turning the sane into the insane and the insane into the sane. Fantasies and desires become more tangible than the solidity of reality, allowing the dead to peer into life and converse with its inhabitants.

When Watanabe, the novel’s protagonist, writes about his promotional forest of fantasies twenty years after the events, he finds that what he writes is what he remembers, and what he remembers is what he desires. Thus, he experiences the asylum, accompanied by a narrative heritage that stretches from Scheherazade to Thomas Mann’s *The Magic Mountain*, a novel that tells the story of another mental asylum. Narrative is life, and life is narrative. But the horrifying result, the one that truly shatters his existence, in this intertwining, is that in his retreat into this subjective shell, he loses the “boundaries” between worlds. He no longer knows where he is. Who died—his friend Kizuki, his girlfriend Naoko, or he himself? In his last contact with his girlfriend Midori, who symbolizes actual life in flesh and blood, he discovers that he has always been communicating with her from beyond another world, from the nowhere lost in the darkness of places. He himself is confronted with the fragility of actual reality, and he shocks us, the readers, with the blurring of boundaries between narrative and reality, life and death, reason and madness, consciousness and unconsciousness.