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David Mitchell's second novel,Number9Dream, tells the story of Eiji Miyake, a young man negotiating a hypermodern and dangerous Tokyo to meet for the first time his secretive and powerful father. Naïve and fresh from the Japanese countryside, Eiji encounters every obstacle imaginable in his quest, from his father's--and in-laws'--reluctance for the encounter to occur (Eiji is the bastard son) to fiery entanglements withyakuza(the Japanese mafia) to the overwhelming size and anonymity of Tokyo itself.
The novel is cartoonish in that Eiji has a vivid and violent imagination that fills the book with daydreams. When not chain-smoking, forlorn Eiji wanders the city following vague or cryptic leads that invariably dead-end or land him back among yakuza. Mitchell (author of the critically acclaimedGhostwritten) has a smart, eclectic writing style that seems foreign, and the novel is well paced, but the yakuza encounters are too cinematic, complete with unusual torture and pyrotechnics. Moreover, in addition to Eiji's daydreams, the last half of the book contains excerpts from the diaries of his great uncle's World War II naval heroics and bizarre short stories that Eiji reads while hiding--the latter of which make for tedious reading.
Number9Dreamis crafted from too many disparate components; it does not seem to be a full expression, but an overly crowded one. Readers will sympathize with Eiji and his search, but in the end will wonder what effect, if any, all the extraneous forces had on him. The book provides many fun moments, but ultimately it doesn't really add up to the sum of its parts.--Michael Ferch
Number9Dream-David Mitchell This book is a unique piece of literature, unlike anything i have ever read before. The book begins with a nervous 20-something Japanese man sitting in a coffee shop contemplating the massize building outside it. This man Eiji Miyake turns out to be the main character, and the book is mostly about his coming of age in Tokyo. The son of a prostitute, his mother went into rehab when he was young and he never met his father. Growing up on a rural Japanese island with his extended family Eiji lost his twin sister and became somewhat alone in the world. The book begins as he moves to Tokyo to begin a search for his long lost father. The basic plot is often interrupted by dreams, stories, diary entries, flashbacks, flash-forwards, fantasies, imaginings, daydreams, and more, which makes for an interesting, but confusing read. The novel takes alot of thinking to understand, and even more to fully process. By the end of the book you cannot tell what is the truth and what is the imaginings of Miyake, because you are so fully fused into this incredible character. Mitchell weaves an intricate web of the chance happening and thoughts in the life of Eiji Miyake, creating a beautiful and mysterious novel, with a heartbreaking twist.
Are all of the reviews here beside the point? I happened to enjoy this book more than some did, and though I think I would rate the best parts of Ghostwritten more highly, I thought that number9dream worked more evenly throughout. For one thing, while the complex links between chapters of the first book were impressive and well-handled, in this book Mitchell set himself a more difficult narrative challenge of a complex chronological framework anchored to a "present" that runs from 8/25 to 10/9/2000 (John Lennon once said, "Can you imagine a sixty-year-old Beatle?")---the climax is based on a real event, which, however, occurred in a different part of Japan and a few days earlier, but that's poetic license. There is also the game Mitchell played with himself---though it has thematic and structural purposes---of using the number 9 in "incidental" details: i.e., "how cleverly can I do this without being obtrusive?" (for which I would give him a B+).
After seeing a review of this book on the amazon UK site that implied that the US and UK editions might differ considerably (more than just honor/honour or elevator/lift), I was curious---particularly because a number of the reviews here mentioned style. So I ordered the UK edition. Well, guess what, folks: if to say that these are different books would be hyperbole, to say that they are the same is impossible, no matter how you stretch the meaning of that word.
It is not simply a matter of a variant word or phrase here and there, or missing passages, or sections being ordered differently---phenomena that students of literature are familiar with even in the "classics"; from the first sentence on (entirely different in the two books), there is hardly anything the same---even if the words occur in more or less the same order, then the punctuation or the paragraph breaks have been changed. (Of course, there probably are whole pages that are unchanged, but random dips into the book have not yet allowed me to find any such passages.)
I, frankly, am scandalized. Going on the assumption that the UK edition is the original and therefore represents the author's intention, I would recommend a boycott of the US edition altogether. It is of course likely that Mitchell allowed and even possible that he contributed to the changes, but most of them strike me as pointless and not obvious improvements.
(Errata: I assume that changing Friday, October 6 [UK, 368] to Friday, October 12 [US, 347] is just a mistake: there can't be a Friday 10/12 in the same year as a Thursday 10/5 [UK, 363; US, 342]. The mistake about the number of cards chosen [UK, 358-59; US, 338-39] is in both versions, and might either be the author's or---intentionally---the narrator's.)
Some of the changes, however, have the unpleasant smell I have come to recognize as due to the sort of copyeditor who would change a list of passersby the narrator is watching from "pin-striped drones, a lip-pierced hairdresser, midday drunks" to "city office drones, lip-pierced hairdressers, midday drunks" because the nouns in a list are supposed to agree in number. Apparently there are crowds of both office drones and lip-pierced hairdressers on that busy Tokyo street! As to why "pin-striped" was changed, I haven't the faintest idea---the nice echoes of the p's in "lip-pierced" are lost---but it does give you an idea of what the changes are like.
P.S. (9/9) Happy Birthday, Eiji!
Not a five only because... I can't QUITE say that it's perfect. But I loved it all the same. It's now on my top five with: Life of Pi, Ender's Game, The God of Small Things, and Memoirs of a Geisha. (listed that so you know my taste).
I read this book while actually living in Japan. That, along with me being half Japanese, made me REALLY hesitant to read a foreigner's understanding and opinion of the country, embedded in his writing. But I was desperate for an English book and I knew I liked Cloud Atlas, so I took a pessimistic chance and bought it (at Kinokuniya book store in JR? Umeda Station (Osaka). This place has about 300? English books, best place I found in the area).
So about the book - Mitchell is not at all annoying with his descriptions of anything Japanese. He knows exactly how to describe roach motels, futons, buildings, crosswalks so that you can picture them all perfectly and accurately. In 1975, James Clavell wrote to foreigners, calling kimonos robes and making his hero protagonist non-Japanese. Today, English readers know better than that and don't have to put up with the exaggerated east/west conflict or read past any Japanese stereotypes in Number9Dream.
It is easy and REALLY enjoyable to read. The characters are very likeable (spell?) and the plot is entertaining. I think we can trust Mitchell's writing to always be smart. If your mind has already been opened to the world (by that I mean something more than just being a tourist in another country), I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy this book.
