Looking For Reality

Eiji Miyake is searching for a father he's never met, whose name he doesn't know. To track Dad down, he considers using lies, truths, computers and guns; in the end his most effective weapon is a pizza. In Number9Dream (Random House; 400 pages), David Mitchell returns to a setting from his widely acclaimed 1999 debut, Ghostwritten: a dystopian and dysfunctional Japan, one-part William Gibson, two-parts Murakami—Ryu and Haruki. Like a cyberage Holden Caulfield, 19-year-old, fresh-from-the-countryside Miyake plods his way through Tokyo's cityscape, rubbing elbows with Uber-hackers, war veterans, playboys and yakuza-cum-spiritualists. Along the way he gets lost, kidnapped, chased, stoned, hired and falls in love. The pizza delivers him to his father—but, without giving away the twist in the tale, it's not the kind of meeting you might expect.

The book is better taken as an elusive study of reality through dreams—nine of them, to be almost precise—than a straightforward coming-of-age tale. To set the chimerical tone, Mitchell employs an intriguing narrative technique: when Miyake interacts with other characters, we "hear" the soliloquies of his thoughts, as well as the spoken dialogue. And every once in a while, the two seem to blend together, leaving the reader guessing for pages on end.

Unlike Mitchell's first book, a loosely connected collection of stories, Number9Dream is a more fully fleshed-out tale, and reaffirms what many had already suspected: the arrival of a vastly talented and imaginative novelist.