Saturday, July 20, 2002
Title: number9dream
Author: David Mitchell
Publisher: Sceptre
number9dream is the second novel by British author David Mitchell, as with his debut Ghostwritten, influenced by his residence in Japan. Number 9 Dream is the story of Eiji, who comes to Tokyo looking for his father. The child of a married man's mistress, Eiji has never met his father, and his mother was an alcoholic who abandoned him and his sister with her family. With the death of his twin sister Anju at 11 years old he has been driven by his need to find his father. Between his father's lawyer and wife though, it seems that fulfilling this dream is not going to be easy. Along the way he somehow gets mixed up with the Yakuza and finds that things keep getting more complicated than they should be, though luckily makes enough friends to see him through the hard times.
To go with the title number9dream the book is broken into nine chapters, though to be fair the 9th part is blank. With that each chapter has an idea of dreams, or at least narrative injections - from the first chapter's day dreams, through the letters from a repentant mother, scenes from a computer game, sections from children's stories and the diary of a soldier during the second world war. Some of these contributions are quite nice and compliment the overall narrative quite well, some probably should contribute quite nicely, but for me become something of a drag - the main examples being the war diary and children's story. In the last chapter there is some reference to the title, with the suggestion that it was either a Beatle's or John Lennon track, with in turn reference to the track Norwegian Wood, which is the name of one of the most well known novels by one of Japan's most well known author's Murakami, who is also passingly referenced earlier in the book. Keeping with the title's themes the number 9 is something, which crops up repeatedly, having a certain significance in Japanese numerology.
Mitchell has clearly immersed himself in the culture of Japan in his time there, seeming to be well versed in language and geographical ideas of Japan. Which makes the narrative so much more fluid and allows for a certain level of extra detail that wouldn't be possible otherwise. In addition to his main narrative the sub narratives in each chapter demonstrate the range of the author and make this more than just the story of a boy looking for his father. Though as I've already mentioned the enjoyment of some of those add ins varies, and one could almost expect that they become too much of a gimmick on the whole. Though to be fair I enjoyed the book over all, the sections that didn't do it for me being brief enough that they didn't affect overall.
RVWR: PTR
July 2002
