”How do daydreams translate into reality?”

Another book which proves what an absolute genius and magician David Mitchell is as a Writer. Yes, my head exploded again

n  I'm not sure if making the reader fall asleep when exploring the boundaries of dreams and reality is a total #Win or an absolute #Failn
The first chapter is amazing though, I have to accept it, the author mixes real events with the imagination of the main character who keeps fantasizing about the development of the upcoming events. I don't remember reading something similar before. It's a shame the rest is quite different.
The rest of the book is a rollercoaster of incredibly boring events, extremely tense and exciting moments, and a series of random happenings that are neither boring nor exciting but totally unrelated -the book might as well had been 200 pages thinner-, all of that combined in a loop that repeats until the end of the novel: super boring--> super exciting --> totally unrelated --> super boring and so on.
This novel is the perfect example of what you get when you have several isolated good ideas and try to put them together no matter what: A coming-of-age novel by David Mitchell about an orphan in Japan that merges the realm of dreams with reality, narrated with an incredibly original style? Sounds great, what can go wrong?
Though the main plotline was somehow clear, most of the time I had no idea of what was going on. Yes, I kind of get the point of "introducing the reader into the undefined boundaries of dreams and reality" and stuff, but I don't know if writing so confusingly is the best way to explore those boundaries.
Maybe confusingly is not the most appropriate word (yet, it's the one that conveys my frustration most efficiently), because every part seems clear and kind of makes sense... by itself, not as a part of a whole. Number 9 dream is a pastiche of genres and styles: flashbacks, journal entries, fantasies, dreams, memories etc.
My problem is not the amount of literary devices used, but the looseness of the novel. After reading the book, in my mind I only have scattered information about a young man called Eiji. Don't ask me more.
After a second thought, my greatest problem with this book is the incoherence between content and form, let me explain: the style is like nothing I've read before, unique and original. But there is no character development, you face several high tension moments and yet, I'm incapable of saying which one was the climax, and finally, I didn´t get it. I mean, I didn´t get it at all. I simply don't understand what was the point of 400 pages of a beautifully written, original and innovative novel. I fell I arrived to the same place where I started. It was like reading a meaningless Murakami (His work, clearly inspires the novel, he is even mentioned).
I must say that this is not what I expected. I read Cloud Atlas last year and was completely fascinated. Yes, Mitchell is ambitious and pretentious, but he nailed it with Cloud Atlas, here, he aimed too high.

Only one of Mitchell’s first three books to be a novel rather than a series of short stories – although even then it can be seen as a series of 8 separate sections each with a distinct theme or style.

Story is about Eiji Miyake, a 20-year-old twin who grew up on a small island with uncles and grandparents never knowing his father and with an erratic mother who only visited occasionally. Eiji’s twin Anju died in a swimming accident on the first day that the two ever spent apart (and after Eiji had promised a Thunder-God anything he wanted if he would help Eiji be a football star) and now Eiji – still haunted by her death - visits Tokyo, staying above a video shop owned by Buntaro a friend of a relative hoping to trace his father based on a card he has with the name of a lawyer.

In the first section Eiji plays out in his mind various fantasies about confronting the lawyer (at first the reader struggles to tell apart reality and fantasy) sitting in a café and falls in love with one of the waitresses.

The second part is his adventures working in a lost property office.

In the third he visits an arcade and a rich kid Yuzu, dumped by his girlfriend, befriends him, goes to a bar with him and picks up two girls and then with them visits an exclusive hostess club to humiliate one of the waitresses there – Miriam. Miriam implies she knows Eiji’s Dad and he visits her only to find she had assumed he was Yuzu’s brother.

In the fourth Eiji is kidnapped and threatened by Yakuza – he finds himself in the middle of a Yakuza succession battle, with one of the battlers being Miriam’s boyfriend and believing he like Yuzu has slept with her. After witnessing various horrors and multiple deaths he escapes. This section is like something from a Tarantino film – various times Eiji, who is sickened by the violence, observes that writers or filmmakers who feature gangster violence would desist if they encountered the real thing, but this seems a little false of Mitchell given the lengths to which he describes the violence.

The next section is very weak; as Eiji hides out (and begins a relationship with the waitress Ai) he reads some bizarre fiction featuring a character called Goatwriter (which seems a link to “Ghostwritten”). Meanwhile during these sections he has received letters from his mother – telling how she nearly deliberately killed him as a child but wanting to now see him – and his stepmother warning him of his quest.

In the next section he is approached by his grandfather who seems keen to build a relationship but then dies – his grandfather gives him a copy of a diary kept by his brother a suicide submariner which features heavily in this section. He is warned off again by his stepmother and decides to abandon his quest.

In the penultimate section, working in a pizza parlour he is again kidnapped and nearly killed by Yakuza (wanting revenge for the destruction in the previous succession battle) – he escapes when the Yakuza boss has a sudden heart attack, then receives a pizza order he suddenly realises to be from his Dad who is actually a colleague of the lawyer. He realises his Dad is completely disinterested in him (previously he hopes his Dad has not known of his quest) and hearing again from his mother (and based on Ai’s prompting which he initially rejects) decides to answer another plea from his mother to visit.

The last section he travels to see his Mum and then to his home island to visit Anju’s grave – in this section action is interspersed with bizarre dreams featuring many of the book’s characters and various people he meets who are interested in dreams, at the end Tokyo is destroyed in an earthquake (which may be another dream).

Extremely enjoyable and readable with sympathetic characters – particularly Eiji.

The book is sub-Murakami – although Eiji is a very different and much more reactive thinking character than Murakami’s passive narrators. At the end he meets John Lennon who explains, “’# 9 Dream’ is a descendant of ‘Norwegian Wood’. Both are ghost stories. ‘She’ in ‘Norwegian Wood’ curses you with loneliness. The ‘Two spirits dancing so strange’ in ‘#9 Dream’ bless you with harmony. But people prefer lonliness to harmony”.

I have never been a big fan of John Lennon's solo music. I've always gravitated more to McCartney and Harrison, but I figured I owed it to myself to listen to "#9 Dream" a bunch times. I've always liked the song, but haven't heard it much in recent years. I did this after I finished the book, and the song definitely evokes a feeling-- or a vibe, if you will -- that suits the book. One of the things that surprised me about this book is how little music actually figures into it. Music is definitely present, but is not as prominent as I suspected it would be.

Ths is a coming of age story, and unlike Ghostwritten, it follows a single point of view throughout. Eiji Miyaki is a 20 year old young man who comes to Tokyo in search of a father he has never known. He is also running from the ghost of his dead twin sister and his alcoholic mother. That's the basic story, but there is nothing basic about this book. Mitchell takes what could have been a straightforward family drama and turns it into a fever dream, filled with video game fantasies, gang wars, urban hellscape commentary and, yes, actual dreams. I am not a big fan of dream sequences in general, and I had to struggle through a bunch of them, but in Mitchell's defense they do work in this story.

This is a book about finding oneself amid the chaos of modern life, of grounding oneself in truth when truth is extremely elusive, of distinguishing between the dream world and the real world when the lines are very blurred.

At about 100 pages in, I seriously thought I wasn't going to like this book, but it won me over. I still don't think it's as profound as Ghostwritten, but it sticks with me. I find Mitchell's preoccupation with accidental encounters (call them coincidences if you like) and how they affect our lives fascinating. He explores all kinds of linkages between people and events where there shouldn't be any. I like that a lot.

Next up on my Mitchell journey: Cloud Atlas.