Number9dream

I finished Number9dream last night, so have now read all Mitchell’s published works.

The structure of the book is what I had hoped Mitchell’s other books would be – a single story, interspersed with different voices. Eiji Miyaki, a country boy from Japan, comes to Tokyo in search of his father, but this soon becomes complicated enough to involve several different jobs, a love affair and more than one run-in with the Yakuza.

Mitchell’s greatest asset is disorientation. The boundaries between truth and fantasy are clearly demarcated, but of course, when you begin the book, you can’t see the pattern, so suddenly you don’t know whether what you’re reading is sci-fi, a spy thriller or a wild fantasy. Of course, it turns out to be the latter. Eiji is a vivid daydreamer.

Parallels have been drawn by reviewers to Billy Liar, but Eiji does not lie, he simply imagines fantastical scenarios, and keep them to himself. As Number9dream progresses, the sections that weave around the narrative change: dreams, diaries – even a collection of children’s stories about a goat, a chicken and The Missing Link (later compared to the superego, ego and id, though the analogy doesn’t quite work). These stories, all on the subject of being a writer, are rather incongruous; I suspect Mitchell has included them despite their being written quite outside the composition of this novel, especially as they are so utterly British. Still, they are entertaining enough to be welcome additions. This bravura literary acrobatics display sometimes makes the book drag, with a little too much indulgence, particularly towards the end, where inspiration seems to dribble one to the floor, where Mitchell tries to mop it up with feeble poeticism in an attempt to give a dreamlike state. Really, the novel should have ended fifty pages earlier.

It’s a shame, because I really thought this would be the novel I liked the most, but it wasn’t as satisfying as the other two disjointed books because despite the fact that my hopes for one single, unified story were answered, it just isn’t a very good story at all.

Reality soon becomes stranger than fiction, and the sections of ‘real’ narrative get more and more outlandish. The yakuza segments are totally bizarre and outrageous, with lots of death and fireballs and life-on-the-line card games, the drug-fuelled double date Eiji is drawn into seems like an adolescent fantasy, but is just about passable, and when what seemed to be a deranged computer hacker’s delusion of grandeur and ridiculous false hope turns out to be a reality, the whole thing is too ridiculous to believe. Which is, essentially, the point.

We’re supposed to be questioning the reality of what we read because of the dreamlike nature of the narrative. But this is no excuse for a weak and rambling story. Add to this a dull love story, in which I wanted to tell Eiji that he deserves better (since beyond a nice neck and an appealing intelligence, Ai did not strike me as at all an attractive character – but hey, different strokes for different blokes!), and the book just seemed to be a jamming together of different ideas that Mitchell wanted to write into a story that didn’t really accommodate them.

Still there were some moments that I very much enjoyed. The flashbacks to Eiji’s childhood with his twin sister were poignant, elegant and rang true to my own memories of what being a child was like. They also had a scenario that seemed to be straight out of anime! Indeed, alongside a reference to Miyazaki’s Laputa, I DID wonder whether Eiji mentioning an ‘Unfamiliar Ceiling’ was a reference to Evangelion. I wouldn’t be surprised.

There was more self-reference in this book. The foul Mongolian gangster from Ghostwritten reappears, and I finally get to know why such an incongruously Japanese idol-type name as ‘Zizzi Hikaru’ popped up in the thoroughly Korean segment of Cloud Atlas. I’m not a big fan of these show-off’s self-references, but they don’t do any harm. Even the overused ‘Cloud atlas’ imagery comes from one of Eiji’s musings.

So the book had moments that were very entertaining, and the pure, naïve young protagonist was certainly appealing, but as a story, it didn’t really work, and the feeble ending was a real let-down.

Apparently it’s all very derivative of Murakami. Suddenly, the Murakami books sitting waiting for me to pick them up and read them have lost a fair chunk of their appeal.