Piquant slice of modern Japan.

The Story:

The book begins with a nervous 20-something Japanese man sitting in a coffee shop contemplating the colossal building that he has been staring at for who knows how long. This is Eiji Miyake, and the book is mostly about his coming of age in Tokyo.

The son of a prostitute, his mother went into rehab when he was young and he never met his father except in the dreams of adolescents. Growing up on a rural Japanese island with his extended family Eiji lost his twin sister and became alone in the world. The book begins as he moves to Tokyo in search of his missing father. The search gets him entangled with the yakuza (Japanese Mafia) and leads him to the love of his life.

Ai, the girl he falls in love with, shows him what true strength is. When her parents threaten to disown her if she pursues a musical career in Paris, she chooses the City of Light at the cost of her parents. Eiji's love for Ai and his own risks and brushes with disaster eventually teach him that not all dreams are worth dying for, and that a young man learns his identity by making his own complex choices, not by trying to recapture the past. Does he ever find his father? Can he reconcile with his mother and come to terms with the death of his sister? Are we all living in a dream or reality and is there really a difference? If you are brave, read and puzzle it out for yourself.

Comments:

Number9Dream can be a challenging read at times, particularly when passages within each chapter go out of sequence and some real events spiral off into Caulfield-esque fantasies, but there is just enough consistency in the plot to keep you hooked. The plot is often broken up by, stories, flashbacks, daydreams (the first hundred pages?), and more (one of my favorites is the journal of a World War 2 suicide submarine pilot) which makes for an interesting, although confusing read. The novel takes a great deal of contemplation to understand, and even more to fully process. By the end of the book, you cannot tell what the truths are and what the daydreams of Miyake are.

He is not Murakami, but fans of his will love Mitchell's nature to deal with dreams and reality as if they were interchangeable (the point being that there may be no difference at all). The author does not hide the fact that Murakami is a large influence in the novel. Mitchell seems to want uninitiated readers to seek Murakami out, knowing that he is only an acolyte.