A review by jessgock
number9dream, by David Mitchell
4.0
There is a compelling story here, but it sometimes gets lost among all the layers of this novel, most of which reads like David Mitchell trying very hard to be [a:Haruki Murakami|3354|Haruki Murakami|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1350230608p2/3354.jpg]. The novel switches between dreams, fictional short stories, diary entries, and the actual day-to-day travails of Eiji Mikaye over an eight-week period of his life as he moves from rural Japan to Tokyo to try to find the father he has never known.
You can tell that this is an early Mitchell book - a lot of the strengths of his later novels are here, but it's not as well organized or thoroughly crafted. There's a tendency toward silliness and overwrought scenes, especially the times Eiji gets mixed up with the yakuza (not to mention the bizarre parting gift his friend Suga gives him). It is deliberately hard to tell which scenes are dreams and which are reality, which gets less disorienting as the story progresses but requires a lot of patience from the reader in the opening scenes.
I enjoyed this quite a bit, but having read almost all of Mitchell's novels, this is my least favorite to date.
You can tell that this is an early Mitchell book - a lot of the strengths of his later novels are here, but it's not as well organized or thoroughly crafted. There's a tendency toward silliness and overwrought scenes, especially the times Eiji gets mixed up with the yakuza (not to mention the bizarre parting gift his friend Suga gives him). It is deliberately hard to tell which scenes are dreams and which are reality, which gets less disorienting as the story progresses but requires a lot of patience from the reader in the opening scenes.
I enjoyed this quite a bit, but having read almost all of Mitchell's novels, this is my least favorite to date.