Loved every page.

this is a very disheartening dnf because i was soooo hyped about this book but the writing style is just not for me, too dense too confusing & all over the place and too many scifi shit going on with no simple explanation

Eiji Miyake, 19, travels to Tokyo in the hopes of tracking down his biological father. What follows is a hyper surrealistic literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy pastiche as his imagination bleeds into his reality while he unwillingly is pulled into an underworld both like and unlike what you might expect. In an acknowledgement of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood (and others) Tokyo has yakuza and guns and KGB assassins and perfect necked women and hyper realistic VR games, Eiji is deflowered by some hyper sexual “nymphettes” when contrivances conspire to get him laid; but, yet (and thankfully) Number9 also diverges from being an outright imitation of, well, anything. It’s got coming-of-age-tropes and Japanese tropes typically seen in western narratives about Japanese culture—while not falling into the pitfalls most western writers fall into with orientalism—it, again, feels like a this weird pastiche where I couldn’t actually tell if Mitchell is authentic to a Japanese person’s, though foreign of Tokyo itself, viewpoint. What begins as day dreams and video games begin to enmesh themselves into the overall narrative. There is no demarcation for this, it just slowly happens. One thing it almost always does with these digressions though, is keep the plot as a source of grounding, which helps a lot, I found. The genre and visual motifs and characterization ocellated but you can tell what is the trappings and what is, at least probably, actually occurring. It has interesting things to say about a “normal” life experience. Arguably any fish-out-of-water experience can be an adventure and who cares what is in the strictest sense “real”. Dreams and fiction have equal sway over defining a persons character, and so this literary jazz ensues. This is a vehicle of story that is being explored and used to characterize the protagonist as much as the actual events and his past. What’s more is we know Eiji, from the very start on his trip to Tokyo, is running from something at home. Some experience or event is happening or has already happened and he simply cannot come to grips with it. His mind spiralling out into all these forms of media consumption that form our default perspective feels thematically cogent. He does everything he can except to realize certain truths in his life—until he has to stop and come to grip with it. This was my first novel of Mitchell’s I’ve butted heads against, voice wise. I hated the 19 year old naivety and powerlessness of Eiji; but ultimately think that it was written quite well. If I was rating just my enjoyment of the prose, I would give it 2/5 stars. The nice thing about this novel, though, is just how easily it is to view it from a meta perspective and craft-work one. It is hard not to marvel at such a well constructed piece, and the voice fits the character work. As such, it somehow ended up being not a big deal that the prose were a trudge for me. I didn’t like the tone and Eiji as a person much, but there is great diction and sentence construction and specificity and verbiage—all things I love. By the end I appreciated it perhaps even more than usual for having other elements to propel me through this wild experience. At the meta-level of Mitchell’s novels, The Bone Clocks (spoilers if you haven’t read it, don’t read*) there’s a chapter that feels like it could be the perspective of a horologist that is out-of-body. But there’s so many fantasy and sci-fi elements it’s actually hard to say if this is so. Otherwise, there’s also a book that makes an appearance, another coming-of-age book I can’t remember the name of properly, but also non-consequential; merely an east egg, so far as I can tell. However, this book took a heavy cognitive load to consume and so I have a nagging doubt I could have missed things from other Mitchell novels that were present. Time will tell~

Now that I have finally finished this book I can officially say, I feel about this book the same way I feel about liquorice. It’s long, black, kind of chewy and I don’t like it.

It's like reading a knock-off Murakami. Nothing else to say.

It's not as dazzling as Cloud Atlas or as, well, perfect as The Thousand Autumns of Jacob deZoet, but this is a solid book. Mitchell hasn't disappointed me yet.

It's been a while since I've read a David Mitchell book, but within the first 50 pages, I was reminded again why Mitchell is one of my favorite writers. His writing can be challenging, it's often not what you expect, and there are moments when it's just really exciting and fun. This book was an interesting tale of a young man named Eiji Miyake and his somewhat fantastical journey to make contact with his biological father, but it started to lose steam for me towards the middle. Mitchell is undoubtedly a gifted writer, but this was not one of my favorites.