Number9Dream

Rating:
Summary: Ambitious but fundamentally masturbatory
Review: About 30 pages into "Number9Dream" I couldn't believe that I hadn't heard of the book before and was thrilled that I'd discovered a real gem. Another 30 pages on my enthusiasm was flagging, and soon I could barely compel myself to finish the thing. Mitchell's prose is sparkling and his ambition is refreshing, but this is a superficial and deeply chilly book. Like David Foster Wallace and other young hipsters, Mitchell seems to think it's enough to show off verbal pyrotechnics in his work without bothering to create characters you can actually care about or events that are remotely believable. And it's not modern Tokyo-an admittedly chilly and artificial place-that is at fault, as writers like Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto manage to create a Tokyo as engaging and involving as Proulx's Wyoming or Davies' rural Canada. If you're interested in brilliant wordplay, you'd be better off reading Jonathan Safran Foer. If you're interested in modern Tokyo, read "Windup Bird Chronicle" or anything by Haruki or Ryu Murakami, but stay away from Mitchell. It's too bad that so many of today's literary stars equate playing with words with playing with yourself.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful stuff
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Surrender your body, mind, and soul to Mitchell's creativity
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Kaleidoscope of the Life
Review: David Mitchell's second novel tells us a story of a young Japanese man Eiji Miyake who arrives in modern megapolitan Tokyo in search of his father who repudiated him long ago. That forms an outline of the book which consists of nine parts. The structure of the novel and some of its plotlines are similar to the ones of the author's first novel "Ghostwritten": every part has certain degree of independence (even linguistic) but the plot of the second novel is undoubtedly more coherent and harmonious than of the first one.

Nine different parts of "number9dream" are like disparate edges of the human life in the modern world, they supersede one another: a mixture of sci-fi story with hero's vindictive dreams, sentimental flashbacks of hero's early life with his late beloved twin sister, a dive into erotical nightlife of the modern megapolis, a Yakuza story, a dystopian fantasy with excellent verbal tightrope-walking (which, I believe, played a substantial role in novel's shortlisting for the Booker Prize 2001), meditation about recent Japanese history and meaning of human existence, reiteration of some previous elements with noticeable mob tints, an apokalyptic denouement designed as a secession of dreams, and - silence. Having in mind such genre and wordy diversity every reader can find in the novel something to enjoy or ponder over (personally I prefer Goatwriter's language-twisting Study of Tales and historico-philosophical Kai Ten). Though the book consists of such different parts, it has sufficiently strict plot which joins the kaleidoscope of its separate parts in a kind of bildungsroman, the author of which tries to put eternal questions of human existence using postmodern literary gamut of the 21st century.

Yet the book has some weak points. First, the main love story of the novel is a vapid replica of the brilliant Tokyo chapter of author'r first novel. Second, both novels have one visible flaw - they lack powerful (or even proper) ending. I sincerely hope the next David Mitchell's novel will surmount these literary omissions.

Rating:
Summary: Favorite Book from my Favorite Author
Review: 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...


Rating:
Summary: Captures modern Japan perfectly, a worthwhile read
Review: Don't be put off by the slow first chapter. The pace soon picks up, and with a good plot and wide array of larger-than-life, yet entirely believable, characters, this book is a winner.

The Goatwriter chapter left me cold (perhaps I'm not clever enough to understand its significance), but I found the rest excellent. 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's just enough consistency in the plot to keep you hooked.

As with Mitchell's first book, Ghostwritten, many other reviewers were apparently unsatisfied with the ending, but I quite liked it - my interpretation may differ from other readers', but that's the beauty of not spelling everything out.

Most of all, though, I loved this book for its brutally accurate representation of life in modern Japan. Not only do I feel that I've actually met at least half of the characters described within, some of the metaphors were just perfect (a personal favourite was the reduction of the individual human in Tokyo to a carcass trailing a bank account balance).

Rating:
Summary: 4 &1/2 stars, actually.
Review: 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!


Rating:
Summary: Don't Dream, It's Over...Or is it?
Review: I have to preface this review by saying I've never heard John Lennon's song "#9 Dream", I've never read Murakami, and the closest I've been to Tokyo is watching "Lost in Translation", so there are probably a lot of little things I just didn't get because of my colossal ignorance.

After all that, you might wonder why I read the book in the first place. Well, I was at the bookstore with no idea what I wanted to read and this book was cheap (rescued from the bargain bin), a Booker Prize finalist, recommended to me by Amazon, and I enjoyed the first 20 pages in the store.

The story, if you don't already know, is about Eiji Miyake, country boy, marooned in Tokyo and searching for his long-lost father. The search gets him entangled with the yakuza (Japanese Mafia) and leads him to the love of his life. In the end, he does find his father, which also brings him closer to his mother and perhaps to reconciling the death of his twin sister. Along the way are daydreams, dreams, flashbacks, short stories, journals, a few letters/postcards, and a slew of dreams at the end. Some people say how annoying all the fantasies and such were, but I thought it was pretty clever, for a while. I even enjoyed the Goatwriter stories.

What I didn't like was when reality started to get as strange as fantasy with the whole silly yakuza plot. Other people may have thought it was cool and exciting, but it reminded me of a B-movie or one of those Japanese cartoons shown in America with badly-dubbed voices. In the end, the whole yakuza angle didn't amount to anything and like so much else of this book, I wonder if it was all just an elaborate fantasy.

Ai, the love interest, was far too perfect and maybe she was all a dream as well. Think about it, she's good-looking, talented, independent, kind, and understanding--everything a guy could want--and her only flaw is that she has diabetes. In the end, she just seemed too wonderful to exist in real life.

I put up with all the distractions from the main story, but by Part 8, even I was growing weary of constantly being buffeted from reality to fantasy, from past to present, and so forth. As I read the final part last night, I just wanted it to end, but Mitchell couldn't even provide me with that small amount of satisfaction. Instead, the book screeches to an abrupt halt that leaves me, as the reader, with far more questions than answers. It's the kind of prententious, flaunting style over common sense ending I should have expected. Other readers may have found it clever or amusing or charming or whatever; I just found it irritating.

There are some good things about this book. Despite all the interruptions, the B-movie plotlines, predictable plot twists like with the computer virus (who didn't see that coming?), and the need to tell us what brand of cigarette Eiji is smoking at any moment, the story is engaging and entertaining and Mitchell's writing is sound. You just have to be a certain type of reader who can put up with all the author's tricks and gimmicks, and by the end that wasn't me. As I said, I enjoyed most of this book, but after a while it wore me out.

So, if you've done all that stuff I mentioned at the beginning, then you'll want to read this book, because you'll understand it. Otherwise, I'd recommend not getting involved in Mitchell's tangled web.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Tale
Review: I've read Ghostwritten, and having just read Number 9 Dream, I can easily say that David Mitchell is one of my favorite authors. Number 9 Dream is brilliantly done, weaving in and out between dreams and reality, often merging the two. The story and world of Eiji Miyake is totally engrossing. If you get a chance, definately pick up this book.

Rating:
Summary: Not a candy dream
Review: 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.