#43: Number 9 Dream, by David Mitchell

One of my favorite movies of all time is My Neighbor, Totoro, an animated film by Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki. It’s a magical fantasy tale but the painted backgrounds are realistic and detailed enough to give you a distinct sense of place, that place being the lush countryside of southern Japan. Parts of David Mitchell’s 2001 novel Number 9 Dream happen to inhabit that same southern landscape:

The sun switches on as we cross the Shimonoseki Bridge. So much distance and height compared to that hot iron lung the world knows as Tokyo. Cargo ships and ferries to Pusan and Shanghai line up in the port. I am back on Kyushu soil and maybe that is why I am smiling. Broken fences, wildflower breakouts, unplotted spaces. Kyushu is the run-wild underworld of Japan. All myths slithered, galloped, and swam from this part of the country. The farther south you go, the more people think for themselves. Governments in Kyoto and Tokyo forget this at their peril.

The hero of the story is Eiji Miyaki, who has come north from the mist-shrouded forest island of Yakushima, to find his father in Tokyo. The book is very much a coming-of-age story that provides all sorts of adventure and romance as Eiji learns about his past and comes to understand and accept his fate. There is guilt over a drowned twin sister, an alcoholic mother who seeks forgiveness, and a father who refuses to show himself.

Mitchell is an organized, professional, ambitious writer with a particular bag of tricks. His novels have fancy titles (example: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet) and fancy premises, skipping backward & forward in time. I prefer to catch a writer of this type before all the machinery is up and running—Number 9 Dream was Mitchell’s second novel. There have been several more since. I also happen to love the John Lennon song that Mitchell borrowed for his title.

In Number 9 Dream Mitchell conjures the digital animators of his imagination to refract the story through different sorts of “alternate universe” filters. These chapter are like little acid trips distributed through the text. The first is Eiji’s Walter Mitty fantasy world, in which he imagines all sorts of exotic cinematic variations on his situation. Next is the video game universe, complete with lavender clouds. Finally there is the Goatwriter universe, which is as bizarre as it is disorienting. This universe is populated by intelligent barnyard animals, including a literary goat who has the unfortunate habit of eating his own work, and a very maternal chicken. This section was where Mitchell’s imagination may have gotten the better of him—it was jut a little too freaky, and a little too distant from Eiji’s story, for me at least. It was like when you’re listening to a radio station in your car and then suddenly you’re listening to a different station because you’ve come to the point where that station’s signal is stronger than the original station’s signal. And then the two stations trade back and forth for a while.

Strip away all the special effects and we’re left with a young man and his quest. Eiji smokes a lot of cigarettes, tries a few different jobs, and eventually finds himself a girlfriend. He decides to give up on Dad once and for all and to give Mom a second chance. I found Eiji’s story compelling enough, but I’m not sure David Mitchell did.