The supremely talented Mitchell offers up a Murikami-esque fantasia that is equal parts coming of age story and an exploration of post-WWII Japanese society's cultural search for meaning. There were many 5-star moments but I definitely struggled through the central portion involving the "truly untold stories" of a Goat-writer, maternal Hen, and their sidekick, Java Man.

4.5 stars

David Mitchell zase ukázal, že dokáže psát v jakémkoliv stylu, který si zamane. Tentokrát si vybral Murakamiho - a povedlo se mu to natolik, že kdybych autora předem neznal, věřil bych, že to napsal Murakami sám.
Vlastně je to docela jednoduchý příběh o tom, jak dvacetiletý Eidži jel hledat svého otce do Tokia. Jenže příběh nám vypráví Eidži sám, a on je tak trošku pohádkář. Takže skutečnost se nám míchá se sny a představami, některé scény se odehrají hned v několika verzích... Ani na konci jsem si nebyl úplně jistý co všechno se opravdu odehrálo a co si Eidži přidal.
Bez vložených bajek o "Kozlopsavci" bych se asi obešel, docela mi připomínaly absurdní povídky Borise Viana nebo Johna Lennona, což vzhledem k řadě odkazů na Beatles a právě Lennona bude asi správně :)
Když sencislo9 srovnám s Atlasem mraků, vyhraje asi Atlas. Ale i tenhle "skoromurakami" se mi hodně líbil, doporučuji.

And then I put the book down, and it was all a dream!

No, 9 dreams, only the last dream was like "choose your own adventure" -- a few blank pages like the caboose rumbling merrily at the end. And reaching the end is always a merrily thing.

Little did I know that the opening of nine sections was really the novel in miniature. 20-year-old boy wants to meet long-lost father. Must get into tightly-secured office environment and dad's lawyer from hell. Attempt #1 seems real, but it was all a dream! Attempt #2 is surely real, but it was all surely a dream! Attempt #3 is fool-me-twice, silly me.

Poor Eiji Mayake. Fatherless and motherless and twin sisterless and girlfriend-less yet all of them are somehow within his grasp and yet not! Each iteration, each variation on a theme of paternal angst, meets frustration. Frustration meets the reader. Dreams come and go, some more entertaining than others, some more tedium than the television medium.

Somewhere Mitchell makes a joke on telling the quality of films by the number of helicopters in them. Can the same be said of books by the number of dreams? How about the number of yakuza adventures? To be truthful, I was most spellbound by the ridiculous, arch-evil yakuza episodes. Evil laughter, evil death threats, evil ways our hero must witness other people die to the cackles of evil henchmen complying with their evil master's wishes. Kind of like the movies with flying cars and explosions and gunfire. Like a trainwreck, you rubberneck out of sheer spectacle hynopsis.

But outside of the yakuza thriller eps, this was at times a slog. Personality can only carry the protagonist so far. Repetition is a protagonist's worst friend. The reader begins to dream of a copy editor, of scissors, of the cutting room floor.

What would John say? Because John is Eiji's real father in the end, maybe. And the book is one of Mitchell's hit-or-misses falling closer to the missus, wherein a lot of talent is expended in a wasteful fashion.

And really. "Number 9 Dream" as your favorite Beatles song? Everybody knows there is no "best" when it comes to Beatles songs. It all depends on the day. And the dream. And the book you think you just finished but may have only dreamed.

The story revolves around Eji Miyake, a teenager in search of his father and identity. I found it difficult to differentiate between when he is dreaming and when the real action takes place. My two favorite characters make a sporadic appearance in the text — Eji's grandfather, who probably appears in two scenes, for his mannerism and speech. And the Kaiten soldier in the world war, Kusakabe, a reluctant warrior, at least, a reluctant winner of Chess games. He appears in the significant subplot. There is an interesting connection between him and Eji. Here is a paragraph involving Kusakabe and his superior Abe.

"He even has a volume of Shakespeare. Abe questioned whether the works of an effete Westerner were appropriate for a Japanese warrior. Kusakabe explained that Shakespeare is English Kabuki. Abe said Shakespeare contained corrupting influences, Kusakabe asked which plays Abe was thinking of. Abe let it drop. After all, Kuskabe would not have volunteered to be a Kaiten pilot if his ethics were anyway questionable. He is inscribing not a slogan, but a line of verse on his kaiten. The foe may raise ten thousand shouts, we conquer without a single word."

The end chapter perhaps gives a hint of what the author intended to do in this novel in the voice of John Lennon's spirit, "#9dream is a descendent of Norwegian wood.....But people prefer loneliness to harmony." Yes, truckloads of reference to music.

Always, no sometimes, think it's me
But you know I know when it's a dream
I think I know I mean a yes
But it's all wrong
That is I think I disagree
—John Lennon

David Mitchell and I seem to share a number of common interests that I find reflected in his books: music, the East, travel, language, dreams, and more. We’re about the same age, although I think I have a few more years on Mitchell, and we’ve done some similar things over those years, although I’m merely an obscure malcontent living in the suburbs while he’s become one of the most interesting contemporary writers out there.

I don’t know a lot about Mitchell beyond his novels and the blurbs in the back of the book, so I suppose I really should do some Interwebs research before I go making assertions like those, but over the past year I have been working my way through Mitchell’s works and this summer it’s pretty much been nothing but Mitchell and Marvel comics, a perverse pairing, I know. I started the summer with Mitchell’s newest, Utopia Avenue, a book for which I still haven’t written a review despite my great fondness for it.

In that novel, set during the late ‘60s, John Lennon makes an appearance, under a table at one of those parties Mama told you not to go to. Jasper de Zoet, Utopia Avenue’s guitarist, encounters the Beatle under the table. What are you looking for, John? “My fuckin’ mind, pal,” he answers, just one more doomed figure among the many who pop into this fascinating rock and roll novel. Here in Number9Dream, written 20 years earlier and set thirty-some years later, the figure of John Lennon is everywhere, although he’s long dead now, making an appearance in one way or another from the title through the final scene. The main character Eiji Miyazaki, like David Mitchell, is his devoted fan, and John appears in dreams, while allusions to his words and music make both subtle and no-so-subtle surfacings throughout Eiji’s adventure in Tokyo searching for his father.

And I like that, and I’ve been spending some quality time recently listening to Lennon’s music as I’ve been reading the novel. I’ve been to Strawberry Fields on a beautiful spring day. I’ve been outside the door into the Dakota, just across the street from Strawberry Fields. I was a junior in high school that winter when John was shot. Like many people my age, the Beatles are quasi-divinities to me, the closest things to gods I know in my life. And yes, that even includes Ringo.

But despite my interest in the Beatles and my affinity for Eiji’s character, I found parts of Number9Dream to be a bit of a slog, an experience I have not had with the other Mitchell novels I’ve read. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoyed it, and these three stars equal four stars for most other authors, but in comparison to The Bone Clocks, Cloud Atlas (that phrase appears in this book!), or The Thousand Autumns, this is a lesser work.

There’s also something to be said about the dreamlike qualities at play here in the novel…it’s hard to know at times what is real and not, and now that I’m finished, I’m not sure exactly if everything I think happened in the book really happened. I would benefit from a reread, which probably won’t happen. I would have also benefited from a physical copy of the book, so I could have marked pages and flipped back and forth to better capture and trace the dreams and fantasies and stories separate from the actual physical narrative of the novel.

If we put the novel in terms of Lennon’s work, Number9Dream is less a satisfying three-minute song like its namesake, and more a challenging “Revolution Number 9” soundscape adventure that you are pulled into as the reader, for good and bad. At times I also thought I was in the middle of a Murakami novel, which isn’t a bad thing, either, but again, while I enjoyed seeing the craft of the younger Mitchell here lay the foundation for some of his better later works, I did not enjoy this book as much as I have his other novels.

David Mitchell hat sich mit Der Wolkenatlas einen Namen gemacht; ein Buch, das einem Stunt gleicht und das ich, mit Abstand betrachtet, doch etwas überbewertet finde. Dabei schätzen Mitchells Anhänger wahrscheinlich eher sein Gefühl für Dialoge, Witz, Stimme der Figuren, Szenen- und Plotstruktur, als die postmodernen Gimmicks. Auch wenn diese ihm natürlich zuerst zu Aufmerksamkeit verhalfen.
Number9Dream ist in Mitchells Schaffen insofern besonders, dass es trotz großer Verspieltheit und eigenen Besonderheiten in jedem Kapitel - wie Träume, Tagträume, Rückblenden, Parallelerzählungen etc. - sich vorrangig auf die Geschichte einer einzelnen Figur konzentriert. Und das in einer sehr zusammenhängenden Manier.
Das Ziel ist klar: Eiji Miyake sucht seinen Vater, den er nie kennengelernt hat. Dafür ist er von seiner Heimatinsel Yakushima mach Tokyo gezogen und wird von der Großstadt erschlagen. Mitchell lässt einen an vielen Sinneseindrücken und Details teilhaben, die Eiji dabei wahrnimmt, wodurch Tokyo immer ein präsenter Teil der Szenerie ist.

"Der Samstagabend in Shibuya brodelt und schwitzt. Eine Woche nach meiner schlaflosen Nacht habe ich beschlossen, auf Entdeckungstour zu gehen. Die Stimmung ist so heiß, dass das ganze Vergnügungsviertel beim nächsten angeratschten Streichholz in Flammen aufzugehen droht. Letztes Jahr hat mich Onkel Bank mit in seine Bar nach Kagoshima genommen, aber die ist nichts im Vergleich zu hier. Das gilt auch für die Preise. Ameisenmännchen trinken in Trupps, Krawatten gelockert, Kragen aufgeknöpft. Aufgebrezelte Ameisenweibchen, die Bürokluft in die Handtaschen gestopft. Mein Urteil über Ameisen ist zu streng, wenn man bedenkt, dass ich jetzt selber eine bin. Aber ich tue nur so. Oder haben das am Anfang alle geglaubt?"

Auf der Suche nach seinem Vater gerät Eiji schnell an seine Grenzen: er hat kaum Geld, er kennt die Gegend nicht, und bald gerät er versehentlich an die Yakuza. Aber es ist auch nicht alles schlecht, denn die Stadt hält auch Liebe bereit, ein paar Freunde, und vielleicht die Möglichkeit, seine Schuldgefühle gegenüber seiner toten Zwillingsschwester oder seine kaputte Beziehung zu seiner dauernd abwesenden, trunksüchtigen Mutter verarbeiten.
Egal ob historisches Tagebuch, Fabelgeschichte, simple Rückblende oder Traumsequenzen - Mitchell versteht es, seinen Geschichten einen verspielten Touch zu geben, einen Sinn für Wunder trotz nüchterner Sprache. Besonders in Number9Dream, das in seinen Bildern manchmal überborden könnte, das lange, absatzlose Abschnitte enthält und so Bedeutungsebenen verwischt und ineinander übergleiten lässt, fast wie ein Bewusstseinstrom und doch nicht so abstrakt, ist Mitchell das gelungen.

Und ja, er war lange ein Fan von Murakami. Parallelen existieren, dieses Buch trägt schließlich den Titel einen John-Lennon-Songs. Aber das ist nur der Anstrich - die Bausubstanz ist Mitchell durch und durch.

I fell so hard for this one. New crush.

I hung on for the entire 399 pages just to see if the ending of this book granted any kind of perspective. I couldn't be more wrong. Plodding through the last 50 pages is like reading 500 pages of the dictionary--it's the WORST part of the entire story. At this point, all the plot points have been tied up and Mitchell decides he's just going to drone on for another chapter. I was going to rate this book 2 stars, but after reading these last pages, I demoted it to one star and threw it into my garbage can. I don't care if this review ruined the ending for you. You can thank me later for saving you the better part of an evening.

By the reviews on Goodreads, it is obvious most readers rate David Mitchell highly. To a large extent I can see why; his writing is fluid and vivid and doesn’t try to draw attention to itself too much. Characters like Buntaro, Ai, and Suga are well drawn and empathetic and I was rooting for Miyake the whole way through the book. Yes there are similarities with Haruki Murakami but this is clearly more homage than imitation as Murakami himself is mentioned in the novel and Mitchell has said he is a fan. The boy looks for Father may be a cliché but some of the greatest literature centers on such clichés. The way in which the search for his Father becomes something else makes the cliché merely a starting point and it was the second part of the novel where this is more focused that I really enjoyed.
I’m not the world’s greatest fan of alternate realities or fantasy so the first section where Miyake imagines several different ways in which the day could go made me wary but once the second chapter started I felt more at ease. On reflection, the title of the book should have prepared me for some of the tangential parts that seem so unrealistic, for example, the Yakuza and the violence Miyake witnesses.. When Miyake is holed up after his meeting with the mob, the sense of calm reflection is marred by the mildly irritating Goat writer, chicken stories on every other page while the historical journal, though interesting, seems again, another excuse for David Mitchell to show he can turn his hand to anything. In the end I wouldn’t have been surprised if Miyake had woken up at the end and the whole story had been a dream as the lines between truth and reality were so blurred. As it is the ending was odd but in line with what had come before.
Dreams provide great writing material as the author can let rip, they are disjointed and often scary, but for me, the simple story alone was enough to keep me interested and the dream like scenes were simply an unnecessary distraction. It’s apparent from reviews that each of David Mitchell’s books are very different and I am intrigued to see what else this crazy mind of his can come up with next!

Murakami on speed, a rollercoaster of real dreams and unreal events. What a great read.

David Mitchell definitely impresses with his ability to span genres, always in such a unique style; in fact, he tends to fuse genres, maybe inventing them. Number Nine Dream is vastly different than other novels I have read from him. As is obvious not only from the style, emotional world created, etcetera, our main character specifically mentions reading Haruki Murakami. The same for The Hitchhiker's Guide Series by Adams. I do like Murakami, but favor his less indecipherable works. I find The Hitchhiker's Series not nearly as untangleable as the other two. Number Nine Dream may have surpassed Murakami & definitely Adams in regards to senseless scenes, comparable almost to The House Of Leaves. To clarify, however, the novel is not so much senseless as extremely difficult to logically reconstruct. There are many explicit and/or implicit messages, ideas, themes, etcetera masterfully portrayed throughout.

I guess I prefer stories to remain closer to easily untangled ones...

Another reason I may have missed some important meanings written is that I am not very informed as far as The Beatles and/or John Lennon subculture goes. Number Nine Dream, after all, is a la his repertoire.

A Japanese teenager named Eiji Miyake is searching Tokyo for his father, the man that abandoned him at birth. Eiji thinks he's cursed, has no money, no street smarts, and no clear plan to follow for either this quest or his life. The city he's moved to turns from sunny business area to Yakuza infested red-light district—drenched in neon, alcohol, and shadow—at the turn of a street corner. He thinks his father might be a scum-bag. His apartment has cockroaches.
Things are not going well.
Fortunately, he has the help of a cat, a girl with a perfect neck, a crude landlord, and a slimy hacker to keep him sane, amidst intrigue, vivid dreams, and crushing guilt from his childhood that he can push down but never really ignore.
Number9dream is the kind of book that, if it connects with you, you will fall inside it and get happily lost there. The heat of Tokyo, the heartbreak of losing a twin, the desperation to find a parent: you feel these things in your chest rather than your head, the mark of a well-crafted story.
The writing is gorgeous but dense in a way that Mitchell shies away from in much of his other work. I don't mean dense in terms of difficulty; Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet are more challenging from a stylistic point of view. The density is due to how many of Eiji Miyake's thoughts Mitchell packs into only one book; this is the only one of Mitchell's novels with a (mostly) sole narrator told in first person, and you may come away with the impression that you've lived a full nineteen-years in someone else's head. There are tangents and diversions, but ultimately this novel is about what makes this young boy tick.
Number9Dream meanders through strange and difficult experiences, and the writing has page-long paragraphs that immerse you by switching between topics in an instant and ensuring you way attention and stay invested. The absurd and mundane are stirred together, as are reality and dreams: you don't know when one ends and the other begins, but you're sure to be surprised when you figure it out.
There's a desperate search for identity and meaning, and a very twenty-first century rejection of easy answers to difficult questions. Miyake tries to be pro-active and dictate his fate, but the city of Tokyo has other plans for him, and throws him into one bizarre and dangerous situation after another. He doesn't have an ounce of control, something many might find frustrating in a protagonist—but not me; this kept me interested to see what this novel's universe, rather than characters, had in store.
According to Wikipedia (an always reliable source), this book draws heavily from Haruki Makumari. I've tried Makumari before and found him—specifically his novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World—dry and frustratingly vague. The comparisons of Number9Dream to his work, though, have made me think that I overlooked something special, and so I'll be picking up The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle soon. I don't want to miss out if I could be reading another novel like this one.