九号梦 (2001)

number9dream is the second novel by English author David Mitchell. Set in Japan, the 2001 novel narrates 19-year-old Eiji Miyake's search for his father, whom he has never met. Told in the first person by Eiji, it is a coming of age and perception story that breaks convention by juxtaposing Eiji Miyake's actual journey toward identity and understanding with his imaginative journey. The novel employs eclectic narrations in each chapter.

Summary of the plot

The novel is divided into 9 chapters.

One: Panopticon

Eiji waits inside a café in front of the Panopticon building in Tokyo. Akiko Kato, his father's lawyer, works in the building. Eiji plans to meet her and find out who his father is. The chapter alternates between descriptions of Eiji waiting in the café and his fantasies about his meeting with Akiko Kato: first he imagines trying to bluff his way into the building before storming it with weapons and stealing his file; then that a huge flood would submerge Tokyo and drown him; then that he subtly follows Akiko Kato into a movie theater, eavesdropping on her meeting with his father while a surrealistic film plays on the screen. Eiji drifts out of his waking dreams and, back at the café, he observes the customers and waitresses: he is attracted by a waitress with a beautiful neck and he shares his cigarettes with an old man resembling Lao Tsu who passes his time playing videogames. However, Eiji never finds the courage to confront Akiko Kato about the whereabouts of his father.

Two: Lost Property

This chapter consists of three interweaving narrations.

Eiji finds a job at the lost property office of a subway station. His boss, Mr. Aoyama, is worried that a restructuring could cost him a job; he becomes paranoid, accuses Eiji of conspiring against him, kidnaps a railway manager and finally kills himself.

In parallel, Eiji remembers his youth on the island of Yakushima, where he lived with his twin sister Anju after their mother abandoned them. One day Eiji is going to the mainland to play a soccer game. Before leaving he prays the thunder god to make him win, promising anything in exchange. Eiji's team wins the match thanks to him, but when he comes back to the island Anju has disappeared. Eiji discovers that she tried to swim to the whalestone, a rock in the middle of the sea, and drowned. He takes revenge on the thunder god by climbing to the top of the mountain to his statue's shrine, and sawing off the statue's head before throwing it into the sea.

While in Tokyo, Eiji receives two letters. The first is from Akiko Kato, attempting to deter Eiji from seeking his father. The second is from his mother, Mariko Miyake, revealing details of his and Anju's birth and infancy. Their mother had a rich married lover. When she got pregnant, he abandoned her. Mariko was an alcoholic and was unsuited to raising children, at one point deciding to throw Eiji off the balcony of her apartment. Before she could do so, he fell down the stairs. After Eiji's injury, she decided to bring the children to her native island and give them to her own mother to raise. When present-day Eiji calls the hospital from which the letter was written, he is told she left that morning.

Three: Video Games

While playing in a video game arcade, Eiji is befriended by Yuzu Daimon, a rich final-year law student. Daimon is waiting for a girl who doesn't show up, so he decides to take Eiji to a Christmas-themed bar in Shibuya. They pick up a couple of girls and Daimon takes them to an exclusive bar where he behaves very rudely to the waitress, named Miriam. Then Daimon takes Eiji and the girls to a love hotel where they drink and take drugs, but before pairing off to sleep together, Daimon insists that he and Eiji switch partners. Eiji finds himself alone with the girl who spent her night lavished by Daimon, and despite the odd, abrupt decision, they have sex. The next morning Eiji wakes up to find that he has been left there with the bill to pay, and Daimon is nowhere to be found. The management attempts to trap Eiji, but he escapes through the kitchen of an adjoining hotel and finds himself near the bar in front of Panopticon where he was at the beginning of the novel. He helps the waitress with the beautiful neck to get rid of a bad customer and he makes friends with her, learning her name, Ai Imajo.

Later he meets Miriam in a park. She mentions something about his father and leaves, dropping a library book. Eiji, with the help of a hacker friend called Suga, traces her and finds her address. He goes there and asks about his father, but he finds out that Miriam thought that he was Daimon's brother and so she was talking about Daimon's father.