number9dream

number9dream by David Mitchell

I was quite hesitant to read another book by Mitchell after reading his debut novel Ghostwritten some years back. Then, I was at the peak of my contemporary Japanese literature craze, having read much of Haruki Murakami, Ryu Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto. I looked for pulsing Tokyoesque cityscapes cluttered with buildings and offbeat creatures, human and subhumanl; noir-ish adventures that dived into the backalleys of national psychodrama; unlikely yet redemptive and very much endearing love stories that cleared the way to new futures. Ghostwritten was all of these in part but holistically none of them at all. Overly ambititous as a first novel, it read unfocused at best and you never quite settled in comfortably enough to care for any of the principal characters from Mitchell's global montage before you were forced to jump to the next. Yet, number9dream, Mitchell's second effort if I did not get my facts wrong, is everything Ghostwritten was not. Dizzying and dazzling all at the same time, this novel weaves a story around you that is exactly what the title promises--"the ninth dream begins after every ending"--a cryptic postapocalyptic dreamworld as ethereal and Dali-esque surreal as the John Lennon song of the same name.

number9dream opens with the protagonist Eiji Miyake arriving in Tokyo to search for his biological father whom he has never met, having been abandoned along with his twin sister Anju when they were born. He sits in the Jupiter Cafe, opposite a towering monolith known only as the PanOpticon building, on top of which his father's lawyer Akiko Kato has her office. Before you know it, however, the opening chapter runs you through several expositions of vastly differing genres, from sci-fi wham-bang to pulp fiction political intrigue, only to reveal them as false introductions, fantasies in Eiji's wild imagination--this is merely a taste of things to come. Once the reader launches fully into the world of number9dream, Mitchell repeatedly takes the reader twisting and turning through the alleyways and cul-de-sacs of the Tokyo urban labyrinth. Eiji encounters the yakuza, hacker nerds, modern geishas, WWII suicide torpedo pilots and even one particular Debussy-crazy pianist geek Ai with whom he falls in love. The almost madcap adventure constantly surprises, but never disappoints, just let the momentum of the writing hurtle you through a dream you wish would never end.

The success of the novel lies in its terrific blend of myth, superstition, tech-fiction, detective novel, love story and most of all, growing up. Eiji is the anti-picaro in a picaresque novel--timid, shy and always fumbling into situations, he somehow endears when he never fails to fumble out of them as well. And for those who have an interest in the novel's social relevancy, behind Eiji's personal odyssey, of course, lies Japan's national conundrum with its troubled past. Just as Eiji has to lay his tumultuous past to rest before he can construct new possibilities with his estranged mother and Ai, Mitchell calls for his adopted country to put the ghosts of the past aside, so as to look ahead for new futures. After all, that is what it means to grow up, for Eiji as well as for the national polity. In the novel, it is therefore no surprise that he picks a seeming champion of wartime heroism, the kaiten suicide torpedo pilot, to voice an acknowledgement of defeat and wrongdoing. Eiji himself, upon finally meeting his irresponsible father in the end, casts aside resentment and chooses to let sleeping dogs lie.

At one point in the novel, Eiji meets John Lennon in a dream and questions him on the meaning of the song. John replies that number9dream was in fact meant to be a sequel to Norwegian Wood, but while he initially meant for the song to signify harmony, he decided to forsake that salvation/enlightenment for Norwegian Wood's brand of loneliness instead. I am certain Mitchell intended number9dream to be a kind of sequel to Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood. Murakami's novel was very much about memory and forgetting, losing and forgiving as well. That novel was a love story between the past and the future, each embodied in a ghostly, fragile maiden and spunky, energetic college girl respectively between whom the protagonist had to make a choice. In number9dream, Mitchell transmutes the choice into Eiji's growing pains and I think in this way, he achieves a more coherent and affecting story than the former. Where Norwegian Wood divided what the author saw as two paradigms of history neatly into black and white, Mitchell's novel strikes a far more subtle chord: After all, at the very end, the novel leaves us still cheering on for Eiji to finish the metaphorical race, for the ninth dream has only begun.