The first few chapters were a bit unsettling as you tried to figure out what was happening. Hasn't Eji found his father? Why is he back to square one? Having figured out the book's plot and format, it can be an interesting albeit bizarre read. ( )

By the end I enjoyed David Mitchell's Number9dream but there were times I wanted to give up on this novel it was so bizarre. It begins easily enough, the narrator, Eiji Miyake, is a 20-year-old newly arrived in Tokyo from a faraway Japanese island. He is in search of his father who he has never met and has no name for, just the name of a lawyer who deals with the maintenance this father pays. Eiji is persistent as the reader is fed bits of his back story, including the story of his alcoholic mother who he has little contact with. Eiji has adventures, jobs and meets people in Tokyo while thinking up new ways to find his father. There are gruesome sections with gangsters in his search and a love interest. This is all played around the streets and neigbourhoods of a hot and humid Tokyo, which came alive as he walked and ran through the city. The difficult parts were dream sequences and fantasies that occasionally had a clumsy feel to them but were also as disconcerting for a reader as I guess David Mitchell wanted them to be. Eiji is lost in the city and often feels alone and the reader walks by his side. There were also fairytales that were intreesting but didn't move the plot on. All in all it was a good read that sometimes took a little sticking to. ( )

DNF. Another dud as a day-dreaming Japanese teen tries to find his father. I used to really like David Mitchell, but of the last two of his that I've read I've DNF''d both of them ( )

I'm not sure I understand the ending to this book. I suppose if it is an homage to, or an exercise in Murikami, then you can invoke dream states and cut the thing off anywhere. ( )

After enjoying David Mitchell’s debut novel, Ghostwritten, I was eager for more. However, his follow-up, Number9Dream, was more difficult to like. Its protagonist, Eiji Miyake, a young boy from a rural island in southwest Japan, comes to Tokyo searching for his father. He doesn’t know the man’s name; his only point of contact is a lawyer through whom financial support had been channeled.
In the opening chapter, Eiji sits in a coffee shop across from the skyscraper housing the law office and fantasizes about various ways of meeting the lawyer and obtaining the name of his father. It took me a while to catch on to this —- I took the first fantasy for narrative rather than daydream and, from it, concluded that the story was set in a futuristic Blade Runner world (except for a few anachronistic details). By the time he gathers his courage and sallies forth, I wasn’t sure this, too, wasn’t a daydream.
This first chapter confused and irritated me with its several false starts. I considered giving up on the novel. Even in subsequent chapters, the ostensible narrative is interspersed with other stories. One is a fairy tale involving a goatwriter, and another is the diary of a Kaiten pilot in the closing days of the second world war. Even frequent dreams are often the seeds of possible short stories. Taken together, they gave me the impression of a supremely imaginative author still wrestling with how to harness his vision.
The chapter containing the goatwriter fairy tale ends “Reality is the page. Life is the word.” I’m still trying to decide if this is preternaturally profound or pretentious.
The title is relevant in two ways. First, dreams play a prominent role in the plot, as well as various attempts to define a dream. Example: “Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter.” At the same time, it is the title of a John Lennon song. Eiji is fascinated with Lennon; there are allusions to several of his other songs and snatches of lyrics from others, such as Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.
Spoiler alert: Eiji finally sees his father without revealing that he is the abandoned son. “I feel that I found what I searched for, but no longer want what I found.” More satisfying, surprisingly, is his reconciliation with his alcoholic mother, whom he hadn’t seen in nine years, shortly before the death by drowning of his adventurous twin sister, Anju.
At heart, this is a classic quest. The young protagonist must endure hardship (one chapter is particularly gruesome), undertake arduous journeys, and learn who his allies and foes are through trial and error. But, in the end, discovering the identity of his father and meeting him is only the means to achieve the true goal of his quest, self-knowledge.
So now I’ve read my second David Mitchell. Will I read more? Probably. After all, Mitchell embedded a road sign forward in this text: “the cloud atlas turns its pages over.” ( )