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A review by travisclau
Number9dream by David Mitchell
3.0
Like with Black Swan Green, the novel wasn't my favorite of Mitchell's work. You see all of Mitchell's usual go-to's: intertextual references, metafiction, split narration, plot twists, masterful dialogue. As an homage to Murakami, the book seems like a series of false starts. Ideas that could have made their own books, concepts that didn't have the space or time to develop. The philosophical musings on identity, selfhood, and meaning feel trite here alongside the self-consciously over-the-top scenes taken straight out of conventional action plots and yakuza films that Mitchell is commenting upon in our postmodern moment. A reviewer described it as Joycean, and I think it only gets there superficially with its constant blurring of the line between reality and fiction.
What captured me most was his vivid representation of Tokyo and Japan at large. The cityscape itself has its own development, a characterization that merits revisiting. This, alongside Mitchell's intriguing exploration of Japan's discomfort with both its mytho-historical and wartime pasts, really brings Japan into focus for Western readers. By far the most provocative move for this novel -- even if Mitchell sometimes feels the need to oversaturate the prose with his research of and familiarity with Japan.
What captured me most was his vivid representation of Tokyo and Japan at large. The cityscape itself has its own development, a characterization that merits revisiting. This, alongside Mitchell's intriguing exploration of Japan's discomfort with both its mytho-historical and wartime pasts, really brings Japan into focus for Western readers. By far the most provocative move for this novel -- even if Mitchell sometimes feels the need to oversaturate the prose with his research of and familiarity with Japan.