Customer Reviews

Number9Dream

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

He is not Murakami, but fans of his will love Mitchell's nature to deal with dreams and reality as if they were interchangeable (the point being that there may be no difference at all). The author does not hide the fact that Murakami is a large influence in the novel. Mitchell seems to want uninitiated readers to seek Murakami out, knowing that he is only an acolyte.

If you love trippy novels that make the average, normal persons life seem somehow magical, than you will love this. My only advice would be to not give up on the book. The first 100 pages are quite difficult to get through; a lot of it is daydreaming and initially the difference between the dreams and reality is hard to discern.

I highly recommend this novel!

First of all, most of the other reviewers comments are true, even the comments of those who hated the book. Here's the scoop: Number9Dream is brilliant and moving, occasionally violent and shocking, and almost never boring. The scenes involving "Goatwriter" are everything you might imagine from what you have heard. They are puzzling. They are a distraction from the main story. They are also quite funny in their way. Be advised that these scenes do not pop inexplicably out of the ether, as you might assume from the other reviews posted here. The main character, Eiji, is hiding from those who might kill him, and he stumbles upon the text of a story. To bide his time, he reads this story about Goatwriter. It's odd, but it fits. Most importantly, readers who wade through that short section will find they've enjoyed one of the most satisfying novels they've read in a very long time.

In "Ghostwritten" David Mitchell produced a novel that was stylish, engaging, and above all, clever. He created a fascinating portrait of the chance meetings that drive us on to our destinies; a task that in less gifted hands would be burdensome, but that was elegant and light in Mitchell's. Unfortunately, "Number9Dream" doesn't quite live up to the high benchmark he set with his first novel.

The book's primary problem is that Mitchell was far too clever for his own good. As the reader follows the protagonist, Eiji Miyake, on his search for this father, and his place in the world, they are buffeted by numerous asides, dreams, stories, fantasies, etc. Any one of these is extremely well written, but taken as a whole they make for a disjointed reading experience. Their purpose is to explore the interactions Mitchell considered so deftly in "Ghostwritten" but as they pertain to just one individual. However, the end result is a chaotic mishmash that is frequently entertaining, and always well written, but rarely satisfying.

That said, I wouldn't necessarily recommend against reading "Number9Dream", for one thing a sub par effort for David Mitchell is better than 90% of what's on the market today. Moreover, he makes some really interesting points about the nature of society and his ending (which I am sure many found abrupt) is a fascinating point about the fleeting nature of contentment, ambition and desire.

In the end, David Mitchell should be complimented for writing a novel that challenges the definitions of plotting and characterization. While the attempt falls somewhat short, it is still a noteworthy sophomore effort. If you don't mind a novel that makes you work a little, "Number9Dream" is an interesting effort from a young writer who is just hitting his stride.

While not as good as his first novel "Ghostwritten," "Number9Dream" is an unforgetabe book, and satisfying read for those who are familiar with David Mitchell's style. The book begins in Tokyo with a young man from the countryside sitting in a coffee shop, plotting the best time to invade the building that houses his fathers lawyer. He plaans to extract from her, information as to his fathers where-abouts, which are the focus of the novel.

Though a good novel, it would probably be difficult for people to understand who've never read Mitchell before. My only noteable complaint about the book is that the dream sequences become somewhat jumbled at first, leaving you confused and somewhat angered. I nearly put the book down before the first section had finished. You'll fiure out what's real by the time the second section is about half-way through. Sometimes grusome (that bowling scene is disgusting), sometime beautiful (Mitchell really has expanded on his touching and lovely way of speaking) and like "Ghostwritten," leaves you no really clear-cut ending (something else that might enrage new readers). So basically, a good read for veterans of Mitchell, confusing and annoying for everyone else.

DESPITE WHAT YOU MAY HAVE HEARD
I love the condescension of this book's reviewers. Most of them see fit to deem Mitchell's novel as 'ambitious', that he was far too clever for his own good, but not quite clever enough for them. One reader was barely able to compel himself through the first 60 pages, but was still able to deduce that Mitchell's work was in this instance "fundamentally masturbatory" (I have no idea what book this guy was reading).

A FANTASTIC READ
If you want to read an excellent novel, I would hate to have you be dissuaded by numbskulls with a hazy grasp on the definition of the term 'disjointed.' For a novel that "challenges the defintion[sic] of plotting" the narrative thread is marvelously clear. It is, at its core, a book about a boy searching for his father. But more than that, its a book about a boy's life and everything that fits into that life: what he's thinking, where he comes from, what he wants.

I KNOW YOU'LL LIKE IT
I think reviewers who gave this book 3 stars or less had difficulty with the novel because in Number9dream Mitchell deals in the fabric and machinery of human imagination, how it compels us through the mundane, how it propels us through our fears, and how some of us are driven to nurture it, to stoke its fires and, at times, to give ourselves over to its power.
So if you are not willing to surrender, if briefly, to imagination, this is not the novel for you. But otherwise, give it a chance, let yourself go, and for God's sake love this book. I do.

Here is my previous review for this book:
I read this novel in preparation for Mitchell's latest, "Cloud Atlas", and was totally in awe of the depth of his insights, the eagerness of his narrative, and the beauty of his characters (among my favorites: Pithecanthropus, the tender neanderthal in the service of his secret love, and Kusakabe, the anti-war kaiten pilot on the eve of his suicide mission).
On the ending: I have heard a lot of grumbling. Personally, I finished the novel at 2am (an hour when I couldn't be sure I wasn't dreaming myself) and went to bed frustrated, maddened, making plans to hunt Mitchell down and slap him a couple times. In the morning though, I was awakened to its simplistic and absolute genius. It was perfect because A) it was not a sludge of sappinness pandering to the most obvious emotional responses the novel had been building throughout (writers, take note) and B) it was marvelously descriptive of a quintessential human experience, without overtly being a description.
Is the novel challenging? Yes, but not in the sense of confusing the reader, as some previous reviewers have intimated. Rather, it challenges perception, death, purpose, and the very mechanisms of modern life. All that, and it is supremely enjoyable, brilliant, really really good, funny, smart, genius, flying, and running.
So delve inside number9dream, be carried by its venerable rhythms to your own violent waking...

Is Eiji Miyaki really storming the Pan Opticon skyscraper and breaking into files that finally reveal his father's identity, or is he just daydreaming about it? That is always the question in Number9Dream, David Mitchell's fast-paced new novel which bobs and weaves between its main character's real-life search for identity and his rich fantasy life, between his initiation into a corrupt, money-driven megapolis and his quest for young love. Mitchell, who won considerable acclaim for his first novel Ghostwritten, is sure to garner more attention for this inventive, mysterious book.

By far the most interesting thing about the novel is its Tokyo setting -- rendered as a shimmering urban nightmare, alternately realistic and futuristic. Eiji, a green boy from a remote Japanese island, comes to Tokyo to find the father who abandoned his mother when she became pregnant. Soon, he is adrift in a stew of syndicated crime, private sex clubs and an illegal trade in human organs.

Underneath the surface drama, Number9Dream is also a novel about parents and children. Eiji puts the rest of his life on hold until he can connect with his father. But Ai, the girl he falls in love with, shows him what true strength is. When her parents threaten to disown her if she pursues a musical career in Paris, she chooses the City of Light and lets her mother and father go. Eiji's love for Ai and his own risks and brushes with disaster eventually teach him that not all dreams are worth dying for, and that a young man learns his identity by making his own hard choices, not by trying to recapture a lost past.

David Mitchell's fine second novel, Number9dream, is an excellent book, and all the more remarkable because of the fact that its author, despite being a gaijin (foreigner) has managed to perfectly represent modern Japan in an English novel. The action, though often picaresque, is perfectly believable in context, and Mitchell etches his characters and situations with a sharp, hilarious flair. The yakuza scenes are not 'cinematic,' they are creepy and nauseating,--the utter opposite of, for instance, Quentin Tarantino's recent movie "Kill Bill." Through it all, our hero Eiji remains likeable, believable, and someone in whom the reader becomes deeply interested.

Number9dream certainly bears comparison with Haruki Murakami, but Mitchell, a Briton living in Japan, does not come off too badly. What is remarkable about Mitchell and Murakami is that, foreigner and native, they both explore similar concerns in similar styles. The question then becomes, Are these true representations of Japan? (Yes.) And therefore, what does this say about Japan itself?

Mitchell and Murakami, perhaps, provide only open-ended answers. Everyone has to decide things for themselves. At any rate, I highly recommend Number9dream. It is utterly unpredictable, riveting, and comes complete with a completly unexpected yet entirely fitting ending. Mitchell juggles and reveals the conceit of his title with subtle finesse. The book jacket compares it to Salinger and Dickens, but for my money I'll take Mitchell over either of them (or at least over Salinger) any day.

Twenty-year-old Eiji Miyake travels to the hyperkinetic, frenetic city of Tokyo in this second novel by David Mitchell, the English expatriate author of 'Ghostwritten' who lives in Hiroshima, Japan. Eiji-san has come to Tokyo to discover the identity of his long-lost father, and it's this quest that propels the narrative through the twists and turns, bumps and bells of its pachinko machine-driven plot. Eiji-san can only control the speed at which he plays this game of life that often slips over into the surreal; otherwise he haphazardly bounces around Tokyo and its environs, bumping into random people who befriend him and betray him.

Mr. Mitchell readily admits that he has been much influenced by Haruki Murakami ('The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,' 'Sputnik Sweetheart') and Don DeLillo ('Underworld,' 'White Noise,' 'The Body Artist') in writing 'number9dream.' Readers who are fond of these two authors and their works will love this book. The title, 'number9dream,' echoes the fascination that John Lennon had for the number nine; his 1974 song '#9 Dream' peaked at '9' on the charts. ('So long ago / Was it in a dream, was it just a dream? / I know, yes I know / Seemed so very real, it seemed so real to me.')

The story begins: 'It is a simple matter. I know your name, and you knew mine, once upon a time: Eiji Miyake. Yes, that Eiji Miyake. We are both busy people, Ms Kato, so why not cut the small talk? I am in Tokyo to find my father. You know his name and his address. And you are going to give me both. Right now.' Or something like that.' Yes, something like that, because it's not such a simple matter after all. Slipping into the surreal, the realm of sci fi and phantasmagoria, Eiji Miyake soon inhabits a parallel universe. He goes about his day-to-day affairs, yet the narrative glides onto a giant turntable where the record that's playing repeats 'number nine . . . number nine . . . number nine.'

Eiji's quest leads him into the underbelly of the Tokyo scene, where he encounters the Yakusa. Does his father have a connection to the Yakusa? The origin of the Yakusa - Japanese for 'they without worth to society' - can be traced back to 1612; they were masterless samurai, ronin, wandering robber bands, who, after the industrialization of Japan, have transformed themselves into Armani-suited gangsters, who some call the Japanese Mafia. The code of the Yakusa and the structure of their organization is complex, but David Mitchell navigates their terrain with consummate skill.

After Eiji-san has met up with the Yakusa, he is then warned that he 'must persuade himself that tonight was another man's nightmare into which you accidentally strayed.' Yet the reality of Eiji Miyake's life is haunted and tainted by nightmares and dreams as he time-travels from his cozy capsule in Tokyo to his grandmother's home on the foggy island of Yakushima. In these flashbacks, he confronts ghosts and thunder gods while he seeks clues to the mystery-shrouded death of his twin sister, Anju. As Leatherjacket had told him earlier, 'nightmares are our wilder ancestors returning to reclaim land. Land tamed and grazed, by our softer, fatter, modern, waking selves.'

Through an unusual encounter in the Amadeus Tea Room with an elderly gentleman who may be Eiji-san's grandfather, he comes into the possession of a diary that was written by a kaiten pilot, who, while part of the Japanese Imperial Navy, was stationed off the coast of an island in the Ryuku chain during World War II. The journal entries, as they are read by Miyake in his capsule, are enthralling. Woven throughout other sections in the novel are a fabulist's tale, with oddball characters named Goatwriter and Mrs Combs, and a love story with Ai Imajo, a talented pianist. Unlike the narrative of 'Ghostwritten,' a novel of nine interlinked short-storied chapters plus one, the well-knit storyline of 'number9dream' doesn't unravel or drop any stitches as it goes along.

Some may say that 'number9dream' is no more than a Manga comic strip with cartoon characters and gratuitous violence, but they are missing the allusions and subtleties and humor that lightly grace the pages of this postmodern odyssey. 'number9dream' is a nonlinear novel in nine parts, a multilayered narrative that explores the nature of dreams and reality. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001, this novel is so extraordinary that you'll want to read it again and again and again.

The Story:

The book begins with a Japanese youth sitting in a coffee shop contemplating the colossal building that he has been staring at for who knows how long. Eiji Miyake, the son of a prostitute, his mother went into rehab when he was young and he never met his father except in the dreams of adolescents. Growing up on a rural Japanese island with his extended family Eiji lost his twin sister and became alone in the world. The book begins as he moves to Tokyo in search of his missing father. The search gets him entangled with the yakuza (Japanese Mafia) and leads him to the love of his life.

Ai, the girl he falls in love with, shows him what true strength is. When her parents threaten to disown her if she pursues a musical career in Paris, she chooses the City of Light at the cost of her parents. Eiji's love for Ai and his own risks and brushes with disaster eventually teach him that not all dreams are worth dying for, and that a young man learns his identity by making his own complex choices, not by trying to recapture the past. Does he ever find his father? Can he reconcile with his mother and come to terms with the death of his sister? Are we all living in a dream or reality and is there really a difference? If you are brave, read and puzzle it out for yourself.

Comments:

Number9Dream can be a challenging read at times, particularly when passages within each chapter go out of sequence and some real events spiral off into Caulfield-esque fantasies, but there is just enough consistency in the plot to keep you hooked. The plot is often broken up by, stories, flashbacks, daydreams (the first hundred pages?), and more (one of my favorites is the journal of a World War 2 suicide submarine pilot) which makes for an interesting, although confusing read. The novel takes a great deal of contemplation to understand, and even more to fully process. By the end of the book, you cannot tell what the truths are and what the daydreams of Miyake are.

He is not Murakami, but fans of his will love Mitchell's nature to deal with dreams and reality as if they were interchangeable (the point being that there may be no difference at all). The author does not hide the fact that Murakami is a large influence in the novel. Mitchell seems to want uninitiated readers to seek Murakami out, knowing that he is only an acolyte.

If you love trippy novels that make the average, normal persons life seem somehow magical, than you will love this. My only advice would be, do not give up on the book. The first 100 pages are quite difficult to get through; much of it is daydreaming and initially the difference between the dreams and reality is hard to discern.

Pros: Trippy dreamlike quality, compelling story. Pure escapism.

Cons: If'ya don't like creative use of language-the first 100-pages will seem like a bad acidtrip.

David Mitchell captures Tokyo marvelously in this book, and that's only one of its virtues. The protagonist, Eiji, is a hick from an island in the south who comes to the metropolis to find his father, whom he knows little about -- Eiji doesn't even know his name. Character and author both have powerful imaginations, and the book keeps dipping into Eiji's fantasies, sometimes to the point where you can't tell whether what is happening on the page is real. At first this indeterminacy annoyed me, but then I began to enjoy it -- the book surrounds itself with wisps of might-have-been. What's amazing is that he doesn't let all the tricks interfere with telling a story that I found very satisfying. After I read this, I immediately bought his previous book.