David Mitchell - Number9Dream

NUMBER9DREAM

David Mitchell

SCEPTRE

About the Author

David Mitchells first novel, Ghostwritten , was published in 1999 when it won the Mail on Sunday /John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. number9dream , his second, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and in 2003 he was chosen as one of Grantas Best of Young British Novelists. His third novel, Cloud Atlas , won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the South Bank Show Literature Prize, and the Best Literary Fiction and the Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year categories in the British Book Awards. It was shortlisted for a further six awards including the Man Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Born in 1969, David Mitchell grew up in Worcestershire. After graduating from Kent University, he spent several years teaching in Japan, and now lives in Ireland with his wife and two children.

Spellbinding... makes me hopeful about the future of British fiction. Boyd Tonkin, Independent Books of the Year

The wonderfully energetic prose is constantly entertaining, filled with daring imaginative stunts and the crackling rhythms of the digital age. Borrowing from films, comics and video games as much as from literature, Mitchells Tokyo is a deliciously confusing virtual reality, a maze of bewildering information. Most impressive of all, though, is the fact that when you reach the end, wondering if it was all just a dream, you dont feel cheated in the least. Jerome Boyd Maunsell, Evening Standard

Ghostwritten s range of voices was astonishing. Each narrator revealed anew the authors dexterity and his ability to imagine lives. His second novel is more ambitious and more impressive... the main plot drives one urgently onwards, and Mitchells delight in his inventiveness is infectious... Above all, this is a writer high on his own power. Victoria Lane, Daily Telegraph

Exceptional Mary Wakefield, Literary Review

Following the success of his first novel, Ghostwritten, David Mitchell has redoubled his efforts and come up with a second book that is even more dazzling. Matt Thorne, Independent on Sunday

Ghostwritten was described by A S Byatt as one of the best first novels I have read. Generally speaking, the second novel confronts two pitfalls: rehashing the first novel or eliminating all trace of it for fear of rehashing it. In number9dream , Mitchell negotiates both dangers, retaining what is best of Ghostwritten and creating an original and in many ways more complex work. Shomit Dutta, Times Literary Supplement

The external action of the novel is always engaging. But such is Mitchells beautifully precise style that he can make inaction just as pleasurable... The prose bespeaks a kind of observational rapture that offers the smell of Tokyo streets or even the movements of a cockroach as tiny, cherishable shards. Steven Poole, Guardian

If you like your reality sliced, diced and then turned inside out David Mitchells dangerously addictive second novel will explode your brain with its labyrinthine possibilities. Nothing is as it seems in this future dystopia that combines elements of The Matrix (sub-levels of reality, mind games, beautiful, balletic violence) with the bleak, rain-drenched cyber-chic of Bladerunner ... a brave novel, all the more admirable for his ability to push back the boundaries of the imagination. Andrew Davies, Big Issue

Mitchell catches the multicoloured atmosphere of Tokyo brilliantly from its lubricious demi-monde of pink love-hotels and sex emporia, to the boardrooms where the high-level yakuza plan murderous operations around mahogany tables... He is a wonderfully amphibious writer, happy in all manner of elements, and seems able to produce an endless parade of interesting characters. Robert MacFarlane, Observer

He is a very energised and original sentence architect who elevates the steaming, fizzing city of Tokyo into a city of the imagination... a gifted and unusual writer Russell Celyn Jones, The Times

The diversity and sheer pace of the narrative sets it well apart from most contemporary British fiction and Mitchell is an original with a flair for fantasy... an enjoyable performance oozing panache, this cosmopolitan and fresh odyssey engages and entertains Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

Captures aspects of modern Japan with a compelling authenticity and beauty Juliet Hindell, Daily Telegraph

NUMBER9DREAM

David Mitchell

SCEPTRE

Copyright 2001 by David Mitchell

The right of David Mitchell to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN 978 1 84456 884 0
Book ISBN 0 340 74797 8

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
A division of Hodder Headline
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

for Keiko

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Jocasta Brownlee, A. S. Byatt, Emma Garman, James Hofman, Jan Montefiore, Lawrence Norfolk, Ian Paten, Alasdair Oliver, Jonathan Pegg, Mike Shaw, Carole Welch, Ian Willey, Hiroaki Yoshida.

Noburu Ogawa, curator of Kaiten Memorial Museum at Tokuyama, provided valuable information regarding kaiten torpedos and their pilots. For technical data I also consulted Suicide Squads by Richard ONeill (Salamander Books 1999). Any errors are my own handiwork.

It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.

Don Delillo, Americana

One

PANOPTICON

It is a simple matter. I know your name, and you knew mine, once upon a time: Eiji Miyake. Yes, that Eiji Miyake. We are both busy people, Ms Kato, so why not cut the small talk? I am in Tokyo to find my father. You know his name and you know his address. And you are going to give me both. Right now . Or something like that. A galaxy of cream unribbons in my coffee cup, and the background chatter pulls into focus. My first morning in Tokyo, and I am already getting ahead of myself. The Jupiter Caf sloshes with lunch-hour laughter, Friday plottings, clinking saucers. Drones bark into mobile phones. She-drones hitch up sagging voices to sound more feminine. Coffee, seafood sandwiches, detergent, steam. I have an across-the-street view of the PanOpticons main entrance. Quite a sight, this zirconium gothic skyscraper. Its upper floors are hidden by clouds. Under its tight-fitting lid Tokyo steams 34C with 86% humidity. A big Panasonic display says so. Tokyo is so close up you cannot always see it. No distances. Everything is over your head dentists, kindergartens, dance studios. Even the roads and walkways are up on murky stilts. Venice with the water drained away. Reflected airplanes climb over mirrored buildings. I always thought Kagoshima was huge, but you could lose it down a side alley in Shinjuku. I light a cigarette Kool, the brand chosen by a biker ahead of me in the queue and watch the traffic and passers-by on the intersection between Omekaido Avenue and Kita Street. Pin-striped drones, a lip-pierced hairdresser, midday drunks, child-laden housewives. Not a single person is standing still. Rivers, snowstorms, traffic, bytes, generations, a thousand faces per minute. Yakushima is a thousand minutes per face. All of these people with their boxes of memories labelled Parents. Good shots, bad shots, frightening figures, tender pictures, fuzzy angles, scratched negatives it doesnt matter, they know who ushered them on to Earth. Akiko Kato, I am waiting. Jupiter Caf is the nearest lunch place to PanOpticon. It would be so much simpler if you would just drop by here for a sandwich and a coffee. I will recognize you, introduce myself, and persuade you that natural justice is on my side. How do daydreams translate into reality? I sigh. Not very well, not every often. I will have to storm your fortress in order to get what I want. Not good. A building as huge as the PanOpticon probably has other exits, and its own restaurants. You are probably an empress by now with slaves to fetch your meals. Who says you even eat lunch? Maybe a human heart for breakfast tides you over until suppertime. I entomb my Kool in the remains of its ancestors, and resolve to end my stake-out when I finish this coffee. Im coming in to get you, Akiko Kato. Three waitresses staff Jupiter Caf. One the boss is as brittle as an imperial dowager who poisoned her husband with misery, one has a braying donkey voice, and the third is turned away from me, but she has the most perfect neck in all creation. Dowager is telling Donkey about her hairdressers latest failed marriage. When his wife fails to measure up to his fantasies, he throws her overboard. The waitress with the perfect neck is serving a life sentence at the sink. Are Dowager and Donkey cold-shouldering her, or is she cold-shouldering them? Level by level, the PanOpticon disappears the clouds are down to the eighteenth floor. The fog descends farther when I look away. I calculate the number of days I have been alive on a paper serviette 7,290, including four leap years. The clock says five to one, and the drones drain away from Jupiter Caf. I guess they are afraid theyll get restructured if one oclock finds them anywhere but their striplit cubicles. My coffee cup stands empty in a moat of slops. Right. When the hour hand touches one, Im going into the PanOpticon. I admit Im nervous. Nervous is cool. A recruitment officer for the Self-Defence Forces came to my high school last year, and said that no fighting unit wants people who are immune to fear soldiers who dont feel fear get their platoon killed in the first five minutes on the battlefield. A good soldier controls and uses his fear to sharpen his senses. One more coffee? No. One more Kool, to sharpen my senses.