2025/003: number9dream — David Mitchell

The fortress-grey mountain-faces, the green river snaking out of the gorge, the hanging bridge, mishmash of roofs and power lines, port, timber yards, school soccer ground, gravel pit, Uncle Orange’s tea-fields, our secret beach, its foot rock, waves breaking on the shoals around the whalestone, the long island of Tanegashima where they launch satellites, glockenspiel clouds, the envelope where the sea seals the sky. [p. 45]

Eiji Miyake is twenty years old and has grown up in rural Japan: the novel opens with his arrival in Tokyo, in search of his father. Eight chapters later, he's made contact with a parent, witnessed some appalling violence, fallen in love, benefitted from the kindnesses of others, and had (or dreamt) a conversation with John Lennon about the song 'Number Nine Dream'.

It's fair to say that number9dream is something of an emotional rollercoaster. It's stylistically exuberant, springing from cyberpunk to thriller to murder mystery to family saga to gang warfare to surreally fantastical -- with Goatwriter, who is a writer and also a goat. (Like all writers he devours his drafts.) There is a lot going on, and not all of it is reliably narrated. Eiji is prone to daydreams and fantasy, and he's naive in some ways and melodramatic in others. He has a difficult family history (sister dead, for which he blames himself; mother alcoholic and absent; father married to someone else and absent) and he once sawed the head off a thunder god with a hacksaw from a junior carpenter set.

I found some of the violence difficult to read, but I enjoyed the rapid switches of mood and genre, and the depiction of life in modern Tokyo. And I greatly appreciated the ways in which Eiji was open to kindness -- both in acts of kindness towards others, and in being able to gracefully accept help and support. Mitchell's writing is dense and allusive (everything is connected! but not always in obvious or even realistic ways) and often very funny, though I think I like his landscapes best. And there is an actual cat.

I bought this in October 2015, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

For the 'title starts with letter N' prompt of the 52 in 52 (2025) challenge.

I imagined there lived somewhere, in an advertland house and family, the Real Eiji Miyake. He dreamed of me every night. And that was who I really was – a dream of the Real Eiji Miyake. When I went to sleep and dreamed, he woke up, and remembered my waking life as his dream. And vice versa. [p. 407]