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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780812966923
ISBN number: 0812966929
Label: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Manufacturer: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 416
Printing Date: February 11, 2003
Publishing house: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Release Date: February 11, 2003
Sale Popularity Level: 102763
Studio: Random House Trade Paperbacks
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Product Description:
Number9Dream is the international literary sensation from a writer with astonishing range and imaginative energy—an intoxicating ride through Tokyo’s dark underworlds and the even more mysterious landscapes of our collective dreams.
David Mitchell follows his eerily precocious, globe-striding very first novel, Ghostwritten, with a work that is in its way even more ambitious. In outward form, Number9Dream is a Dickensian coming-of-age journey: Young dreamer Eiji Miyake, from remote rural Japan, thrust out on his own by his sister’s death and his mother’s breakdown, comes to Tokyo in pursuit of the father who abandoned him. Stumbling around this strange, awesome city, he trips over and crosses—through a hidden destiny or just monstrously bad luck—a number of its secret power centers. Suddenly, the riddle of his father’s identity becomes just one of the increasingly urgent questions Eiji must answer. Why is the line between the world of his experiences and the world of his dreams so blurry? Why do so many horrible things keep happening to him? What is it about the number 9? To answer these questions, and ultimately to come to terms with his inheritance, Eiji must somehow acquire an insight into the workings of history and fate that would be rare in anyone, much less in a boy from out of town with a price on his head and less than the cost of a Beatles disc to his name.
From the Hardcover edition.
Amazon.com Review:
David Mitchell's second novel, Number9Dream, tells the story of Eiji Miyake, a young man negotiating a hypermodern and dangerous Tokyo to meet for the very first time his secretive and powerful father. Naïve and fresh from the Japanese countryside, Eiji encounters every obstacle imaginable in his quest, from his father's--and in-laws'--reluctance for the encounter to occur (Eiji is the bastard son) to fiery entanglements with yakuza (the Japanese mafia) to the overwhelming size and anonymity of Tokyo itself.
The novel is cartoonish in that Eiji has a vivid and violent imagination that fills the book with daydreams. When not chain-smoking, forlorn Eiji wanders the city following vague or cryptic leads that invariably dead-end or land him back among yakuza. Mitchell (author of the critically acclaimed Ghostwritten) has a smart, eclectic writing style that seems foreign, and the novel is well paced, but the yakuza encounters are too cinematic, complete with unusual torture and pyrotechnics. Moreover, in addition to Eiji's daydreams, the last half of the book contains excerpts from the diaries of his great uncle's World War II naval heroics and bizarre short stories that Eiji reads while hiding--the latter of which make for tedious reading.
Number9Dream is crafted from too many disparate components; it does not seem to be a full expression, but an overly crowded one. Readers will sympathize with Eiji and his search, but in the end will wonder what effect, if any, all the extraneous forces had on him. The book provides many fun moments, but ultimately it doesn't really add up to the sum of its parts. --Michael Ferch
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Rated by buyers -
Some truly amazing pieces (even the stereotyping yakuza parts were compelling), but Mitchell does not exhibit the control that he shows in different ways in Cloud Atlas: A Novel, Ghostwritten, and Black Swan Green: A Novel. In those books, he takes you somewhere you haven't been before. He switches voices with deftness. He demonstrates a thorough knowledge of popular fiction and how/why it works. These elements are present in pieces in Number9Dream, but without the overall control of the narrative. In the end, the book is unsatisfying. Pieces are evocative, but the whole is forgettable.
Rated by buyers 
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While this is no Cloud Atlas (a truly fantastic novel), Number9Dream is certainly a fun read. Obvious Murakami echoes; a bit too self-absorbed in its frenetic nature, sure. But this is a sharp, fun book. Not Mitchell's best, but Cloud Atlas is a tour de force. Yeah, much of it has been done before, but so what? At least Mitchell is having fun with the genre, which makes the ride fun for the reader as well.
Rated by buyers 
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I am by no means a vehement critic of all things David Mitchell--on the contrary, I would count his "Cloud Atlas" as among the best books I have ever read. However, the two books I have read from his beginner days--Ghostwritten and Number 9 Dream--are simply trashy.
Both these books, in their quest to be edgy and postmodern, just throw gobs of offensive imagery at the reader. There are extensive references to cheap sex, illegal drug use, and extreme violence. It's a tactic that makes these books glean good reviews on account of the fact they "take risks" or "push the envelope." Don't be fooled by it!
Reading "Number 9 Dream," in my opinion, is little better than watching an episode of "CSI" or "The Sopranos" on television. In other words, this book isn't literature--it's cheap pulp.
Rated by buyers -
The quaintly named Number9Dream by David Mitchell is a novel that lies uneasily between sleep and wakefulness and is unfortunately as half baked. I've read and enjoyed Mr. Mitchell's Ghostwritten (with qualifications) and couldn't quite get past the very first fifty pages of Cloud Atlas.
The problem with Mr. Mitchell's writing is that he seems too much in love with his own prose and seemingly pays little attention to plot, story or characterization. It is hard to think that Mr. Mitchell is not aspiring to the style of a favorite author of mine, Mr. Haruki Murakami, but they turn out remarkably different kinds of work. Number9Dream, like Ghostwritten, has some dazzling writing, the work of a true artist. It seems to fall short however in actually narrating a story which is a major sore point. Some of the plot elements in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, especially the whole "nuclear device, save the world" theme was just too thin for a novel not written during the Cold War. Like Ghostwritten, this book has several seemingly different stories, or dreams, with very little apparent continuity.
The saving grace for Number9Dream is some of the wonderfully imagined episodes - so I'd give the book a half hearted thumbs up.
Rated by buyers -
I've got problems enjoying books which've been translated from their original language. I gave up on Soul Mountain after 20 pages, quit on 100 Years of Solitude with 20 pages to go and barely held out Kafka on the Shore (maybe because I couldn't stand not knowing where the heck Murakami was going towards the end, maybe the translator did an above-par job, maybe I was more patient).
So when someone slams David Mitchell for being a Murakami rip-off, I'm saying, "It's about time an English Murakami came about!" (although this probably just shows how poorly read I am). Number9 Dream is lucid, complex (what do Yakuza members blowing each other up have to do with a Silence-of-the-Lambs-like scene in which a prisoner who claims to be God proves the truth of his identity to his interrogator?), verboise, un/cyber-real (one page the main character is laser-battlin drones, another he's being swallowed by an alligator in a massive city-wide flood), weird(!), philosophical at times (can the meaning of life be both unique to individuals and shifting with said individuals' life-situations?). It doesn't hurt that this book was nominated for the Booker in 2001 (as was Mitchell's Cloud Atlas in 2004).
I think a book like Number9 highlights, for me at least, the importance of being a master of diverse disciplines. There is severe need yesterday for "adaptive experts" (high in both innovation AND efficiency), instead of the common "routine expert" (good at what he does best but hopeless in everything else).
Mitchell is an adaptive expert to the max, his one book demonstrating his casual mastery of multiple genres: fantasy, sci-fi, romance, "magical realism", letter-writing (a'la Blind Assasin), football, computer-hacking, even comedy.
No doubt Mitchell knows reality enough to make it his page on which he writes life to its fullest.
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