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3.79 AVERAGE
3.79 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Masterful. With an soft air of Murakami, Kafka and fantasy this novel takes you on a jorney into a dreamy Tokyo were fantasies mixes with realities.
I love the language. As usual David Mitchell writes so rich that every page is drooping with creamy sentences and buttery linguistics.
He also mixes in other stories inside the main one so at times you are transported away from the novel you are actually reading. Dreamy and poetic this novel had me hooked from page one.
I love the language. As usual David Mitchell writes so rich that every page is drooping with creamy sentences and buttery linguistics.
He also mixes in other stories inside the main one so at times you are transported away from the novel you are actually reading. Dreamy and poetic this novel had me hooked from page one.
I'm a big fan of David Mitchell generally, but for whatever reason I largely bounced off of Number9Dream. Sophomore slump, maybe? I suspect it's me in all fairness.
Rereading again 5 years later, as always, such a pleasure to read Mitchell. His language is beautiful and his stories within stories… I’m always left in awe.
challenging
medium-paced
Eiji Miyake, 19, travels to Tokyo in the hopes of tracking down his biological father. What follows is a hyper surrealistic literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy pastiche as his imagination bleeds into his reality while he unwillingly is pulled into an underworld both like and unlike what you might expect.
In an acknowledgement of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood (and others) Tokyo has yakuza and guns and KGB assassins and perfect necked women and hyper realistic VR games, Eiji is deflowered by some hyper sexual “nymphettes” when contrivances conspire to get him laid; but, yet (and thankfully) Number9 also diverges from being an outright imitation of, well, anything. It’s got coming-of-age-tropes and Japanese tropes typically seen in western narratives about Japanese culture—while not falling into the pitfalls most western writers fall into with orientalism—it, again, feels like a this weird pastiche where I couldn’t actually tell if Mitchell is authentic to a Japanese person’s, though foreign of Tokyo itself, viewpoint.
What begins as day dreams and video games begin to enmesh themselves into the overall narrative. There is no demarcation for this, it just slowly happens. One thing it almost always does with these digressions though, is keep the plot as a source of grounding, which helps a lot, I found. The genre and visual motifs and characterization ocellated but you can tell what is the trappings and what is, at least probably, actually occurring.
It has interesting things to say about a “normal” life experience. Arguably any fish-out-of-water experience can be an adventure and who cares what is in the strictest sense “real”. Dreams and fiction have equal sway over defining a persons character, and so this literary jazz ensues. This is a vehicle of story that is being explored and used to characterize the protagonist as much as the actual events and his past.
What’s more is we know Eiji, from the very start on his trip to Tokyo, is running from something at home. Some experience or event is happening or has already happened and he simply cannot come to grips with it. His mind spiralling out into all these forms of media consumption that form our default perspective feels thematically cogent. He does everything he can except to realize certain truths in his life—until he has to stop and come to grip with it.
This was my first novel of Mitchell’s I’ve butted heads against, voice wise. I hated the 19 year old naivety and powerlessness of Eiji; but ultimately think that it was written quite well. If I was rating just my enjoyment of the prose, I would give it 2/5 stars. The nice thing about this novel, though, is just how easily it is to view it from a meta perspective and craft-work one. It is hard not to marvel at such a well constructed piece, and the voice fits the character work. As such, it somehow ended up being not a big deal that the prose were a trudge for me. I didn’t like the tone and Eiji as a person much, but there is great diction and sentence construction and specificity and verbiage—all things I love.
By the end I appreciated it perhaps even more than usual for having other elements to propel me through this wild experience.
At the meta-level of Mitchell’s novels, The Bone Clocks (spoilers if you haven’t read it, don’t read*) there’s a chapter that feels like it could be the perspective of a horologist that is out-of-body. But there’s so many fantasy and sci-fi elements it’s actually hard to say if this is so. Otherwise, there’s also a book that makes an appearance, another coming-of-age book I can’t remember the name of properly, but also non-consequential; merely an east egg, so far as I can tell. However, this book took a heavy cognitive load to consume and so I have a nagging doubt I could have missed things from other Mitchell novels that were present. Time will tell~
In an acknowledgement of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood (and others) Tokyo has yakuza and guns and KGB assassins and perfect necked women and hyper realistic VR games, Eiji is deflowered by some hyper sexual “nymphettes” when contrivances conspire to get him laid; but, yet (and thankfully) Number9 also diverges from being an outright imitation of, well, anything. It’s got coming-of-age-tropes and Japanese tropes typically seen in western narratives about Japanese culture—while not falling into the pitfalls most western writers fall into with orientalism—it, again, feels like a this weird pastiche where I couldn’t actually tell if Mitchell is authentic to a Japanese person’s, though foreign of Tokyo itself, viewpoint.
What begins as day dreams and video games begin to enmesh themselves into the overall narrative. There is no demarcation for this, it just slowly happens. One thing it almost always does with these digressions though, is keep the plot as a source of grounding, which helps a lot, I found. The genre and visual motifs and characterization ocellated but you can tell what is the trappings and what is, at least probably, actually occurring.
It has interesting things to say about a “normal” life experience. Arguably any fish-out-of-water experience can be an adventure and who cares what is in the strictest sense “real”. Dreams and fiction have equal sway over defining a persons character, and so this literary jazz ensues. This is a vehicle of story that is being explored and used to characterize the protagonist as much as the actual events and his past.
What’s more is we know Eiji, from the very start on his trip to Tokyo, is running from something at home. Some experience or event is happening or has already happened and he simply cannot come to grips with it. His mind spiralling out into all these forms of media consumption that form our default perspective feels thematically cogent. He does everything he can except to realize certain truths in his life—until he has to stop and come to grip with it.
This was my first novel of Mitchell’s I’ve butted heads against, voice wise. I hated the 19 year old naivety and powerlessness of Eiji; but ultimately think that it was written quite well. If I was rating just my enjoyment of the prose, I would give it 2/5 stars. The nice thing about this novel, though, is just how easily it is to view it from a meta perspective and craft-work one. It is hard not to marvel at such a well constructed piece, and the voice fits the character work. As such, it somehow ended up being not a big deal that the prose were a trudge for me. I didn’t like the tone and Eiji as a person much, but there is great diction and sentence construction and specificity and verbiage—all things I love.
By the end I appreciated it perhaps even more than usual for having other elements to propel me through this wild experience.
At the meta-level of Mitchell’s novels, The Bone Clocks (spoilers if you haven’t read it, don’t read*) there’s a chapter that feels like it could be the perspective of a horologist that is out-of-body. But there’s so many fantasy and sci-fi elements it’s actually hard to say if this is so. Otherwise, there’s also a book that makes an appearance, another coming-of-age book I can’t remember the name of properly, but also non-consequential; merely an east egg, so far as I can tell. However, this book took a heavy cognitive load to consume and so I have a nagging doubt I could have missed things from other Mitchell novels that were present. Time will tell~
Strange, strange book. But brilliant, and beautiful, and lovely.
I'm so glad I've stumbled on David Mitchell. This is the third book of his I've read in the last year, and I really enjoy the way his stories unfold. This one is the story of a young, perhaps naive man who has traveled to Tokyo to find his father, whom he has never met. He begins his search full of bravado, imagining himself a daredevil who will go to any lengths to confront the woman who refuses to give him the information he needs. Instead, he finds himself part of a much darker plot than he ever anticipated, learning just how much of a daredevil he really is. I enjoy a story full of twists, turns, suspense, and coincidences, and I found number9dream very entertaining. Not exactly a nail-biting page-turner, but an intriguing story with a good pace, interesting characters, and a dash of bizarre.