Number9Dream - Softcover

David Mitchell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340747978 ISBN 13: 9780340747971

Publisher: Sceptre, 2001

Synopsis

As Eiji Miyake's twentieth birthday nears, he sets out for the seething metropolis of Tokyo to find the father he has never met. There, he begins a thrilling, whirlwind journey where dreams, memories and reality collide then diverge as Eiji is caught up in a feverish succession of encounters by turn bizarre, hilarious and shockingly dangerous. But until Eiji has fallen in love and exorcised his childhood demons, the belonging he craves will remain, tantalizingly, just beyond his grasp...

About this title

Review

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 with yakuza (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 acclaimed Ghostwritten) 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.

Number9Dream is 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

From the Back Cover

Praise for David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten

“Mitchell . . . has a gift for fiction’s natural pleasures—intricate surprises, insidiously woven narratives, ingenious voices.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Mitchell is a fabulous ghostwriter fueled by a brilliant imagination and buoyed by beautifully descriptive writing. Ghostwritten is a brave new book for a brave new world.”
—USA Today

“To complement its heady themes, Ghostwritten is also elegantly composed, gracefully plotted, and full of humor. . . . [It] recall[s] Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in its emotional scope and its ambitions. Like the great Russians, Mitchell makes us feel that more is at stake than individual lives, although it’s by individual lives that pain and loss are measured.”
—Los Angeles Times

“An intricately assembled Fabergé egg of a novel, full of sly and sometimes beautiful surprises. . . . In an era in which much literary fiction is characterized by unearned ironies and glib cynicism, it’s hard not to be impressed by the humanism that animates Mitchell’s book. . . . Worth a dozen of the morally anorexic novels that regularly come down the pipe.”
—Daniel Mendelsohn, New York magazine

“Reminiscent at times of DeLillo, Murakami, and science fiction, especially in its continual probing of what is real and what is not, this book remains very much its own thing. . . . It is a thrill to read a piece of fiction this engrossing, challenging, urgent, and ultimately, so very new.” —Booklist

“Unlike so many other chroniclers of the twenty-first-century pastiche—an industry dominated by ad men and feature-writers, not novelists—Mitchell has set out to craft actual characters, not archetypes. The result is a dazzling piece of work.”
—The Washington Post

“This is one of the best first novels I’ve read for a long time. . . . I read a proof of this on a transatlantic flight. When I got off in Atlanta, I couldn’t put it down. I pulled my luggage in one hand along corridors and escalators, and held David Mitchell’s last chapter up to my nose with the other. I finished at the carousel. It seemed appropriate. And it’s even better the second time.”
—A. S. Byatt
From the Hardcover edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sceptre
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0340747978
• ISBN 13: 9780340747971
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 432