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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33894 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-04
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
David Mitchell's second novel, number9dream, uses a similar episodic format to his brilliant but fragmentary debut Ghostwritten to create a more coherent and assured narrative that is part detective, part coming-of-age, story. Eiji Miyake, 20, naïve and wholly loveable, encounters a frantic, exotic world when he comes to Tokyo from his small island home to find the father he has never met.

Pin-stripped drones, a lip-pierced hairdresser, midday drunks ... Not a single person is standing still ... a thousand faces per minute ... oven-hot ... ready to buckle under the weight of cloud at any moment.

Eiji is a dreamer, a Billy Liar for the Cyberpunk generation. His fantasies structure this frenetic kaleidoscopic narrative, conducting the reader on an exhilarating, disorientating tour of metropolis and mind. One minute Eiji is contending with arcade-game cybourgs, the next caught up in a Blue Velvet-type nightmare with real-life (perhaps) gangsters: "dragged into a turf war between wolves with rabies". So what was crazed and charming becomes dangerous and gripping.

This exotica and cyber-unreality allow more traditional novelistic concerns--a boy's coming of age, the exploration of ethical responsibilities or the great human universals of love and duty--to creep up unobtrusively. Pretty soon the realisation dawns: this isn't just fun, this isn't just clever, this is a great, perhaps a very great, novel. A Joycean delight in language and parody combines with affectionate characterisation and an impressive narrative control to make number9dream an extraordinary and rewarding experience. --Robert Mighall

Andrew Davies, Big Issue
`Dangerously addictive'

Review
'If anything more amazing than his debut, GHOSTWRITTEN, this Booker-shortlisted fantasia confirms the Hiroshima-based Mitchell as the most prodigally gifted of young British novelists ... an extraordinary literary cabaret of dreams, visions and pastiches, from video-game rides and gangster rumbles to suicide submariners. Endlessly ingenious and hugely enjoyable - but oddly moving as well. A rich showcase for 21st-century fiction.' (Boyd Tonkin, Independent )

'A clever, contemporary reworking of classic videogame / quest themes ... This videogame is made not of zeros and ones, however, but of dream fragments and poetry ... the beautiful, snake-like narrative twists and tangles around leitmotifs borrowed from action films, manga, anime, SF, fantasy, old detective novels, mob stories, coming-of-age romances, cyberpunk, epic quests and war stories ... Mitchell rolls around in implausibility, takes some incredible literary liberties, and - yes - gets away with it.' (Scarlett Thomas, Independent )

'It's a measure of the precocity of David Mitchell's talent that this novel, the author's second book, is nearly a rare example of a satisfying "anti-novel". This experimentation with narrative form is usually reserved for authors with comfortably established book sales and secure reputations. It is told dexterously ... The book progresses through quick changes of style and texture. This fixes one's attention on the delights of Mitchell's prose. Almost without realising it, you find that you have fallen for Eiji, and that his plight has registered at a deep level.' (Paul Tebbs, Daily Telegraph )

'David Mitchell's second novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and it's not hard to see why. The narrative has a langorous, dream-like quality - the result of being structured around Eiji's fantasies. Mitchell writes well in a range of different moods and styles: funny, poignant, humdrum, violent. Most strikingly of all, he depicts Tokyo as a bewildering labyrinth, which provides the perfect backdrop to the desultory wanderings of Eiji's mind.' (Observer )

'Even more dazzling than GHOSTWRITTEN' (Matt Thorne, Independent on Sunday )

'I haven't enjoyed a novel so much in ages; wild, bristling with strangeness' (Independent Books of the Year )

'Exceptional . . . more than a surreal detective story or coming-of-age novel, more than a portrait of Tokyo or stream of adolescent consciousness, it is unique: clever, unusual, gripping and beautifully written' (Literary Review )

'Resounds to the same marvellous chatter of voices that marked out GHOSTWRITTEN, his outstanding first novel' (Observer )

'Spellbinding' (Boyd Tonkin, Independent Books of the Year )

'A delirious mix of thriller, tragedy, fantasy, video games and a portrait of uneasy modern Japan . . . A deserving Booker nominee.' (Guardian )

'Wildly inventive' (Sunday Times )

'Captures aspects of modern Japan with a compelling authenticity and beauty' (Daily Telegraph )

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Customer Reviews

Anime in Fiction
This book hit me with a refreshing karate chop to my senses. Just when I thought new fiction was getting a bit stale, here comes Mitchell. The plot line to this story is pretty one-dimensional and straight foreward; a young man in search for his father, But The truly delectable bits are Mitchell's description of Tokyo; it's streets, characters and plethara of small details are offered to the reader in multitude. Like an action anime cartoon or a martial arts film, Mitchell manages to string along so many interesting tangents into his seemingly simple story. However, it's not about reading it to find out what happens next and here I must warn you: if you are expecting a clear beginning, middle and end-type book, then look elsewhere as the sequence of events are not wholly linear. It could get frustrating at times as the tangents are long, and beautiful. Nevertheless, it manages to keep the reader in suspense and wondering what happens next. Overall, a great experience and I thank Mitchell of painstakingly taking me with him to Tokyo. A truly magnanimous success.

Draws you in and keeps you there
We all thought Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" was excellent, and were keen to read more by him. This book has elements in common with that one: the interweaving narratives, the cross-connections, the allusions and the clever use of dialogue. But the subject is widely removed from there and, at first glance, looks like an advanced exercise from a creative writing class: "Imagine you're a young man looking for his father. In Tokyo. And you've come from a remote part of Japan. Describe your feelings, adventures, fantasies, impressions..."

According to the blurb, Mitchell lived in Japan for some time, but you still get the idea that he's chosen a challenging topic. It's to his credit, then, that he succeeds so well: the picture he paints of the urban compression of Tokyo is - as far as I can recall from my visits there - exact, and he subtly highlights the contempt that city dwellers have for people from the country (just like, you realise, in every other country in the world). He also makes clever use of speech patterns to distinguish between characters from different backgrounds (to give the most extreme example, he grafts cockney accents onto Yakuza thugs, which seems to be precisely appropriate). The multiple stories seen in "Cloud Atlas" appear here as well - there's a sequence describing the training of Japanese suicide submariners in WWII that's particularly effective - and they all combine together to make this a richly-faceted novel, and a deeply satisfying reading experience.

Heroes and innocents
He's a clever lad this Mitchell, always playing tricks on the reader but doing so with innocence and charm so it never feels smug or contrived: Number 9 Dream starts out as a happy little first-person trundle around Tokyo in the company of a nice young lad who likes to daydream himself into heroic situations. Then the daydreams cross into reality and the hero's life becomes very dark indeed. Very dark. Indeed. Stomach-churning at times but always controlled and relevant as the story moves through to a cracking existential climax.