number9dream by David Mitchell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Man oh man. This book started a little slow — it’s about the dream world, to an extent, and begins there, which lends it an early hallucinatory tone. Not exactly ideal bedtime reading, especially as it’s very slippery for someone to get ahold of as they’re listening to you read it in a sort of fever-haze.
But once it gets going I had to pinch myself, repeatedly (and metaphorically, don’t worry, I’m not a scabby, mottled mess because of this book), and check that this wasn’t a Murakami novel.
It’s a beautifully done, wild romp through Tokyo and its underbelly. It puts David Mitchell’s “Slade House, which I enjoyed, in a different light, though. The writing in this book was far more elevated, the story more finely wrought than Mitchell’s latest book, and it hits you just how damn *good* he is. He writes the young Eiji Miyake convincingly, and the supernatural-ish rears its head only a little bit later in the book, hitting some familiar Mitchell obsessions that we’ve all come to know and love.