Number9Dream

David Mitchell published number9dream in 2001. It is his second novel, and it is set in Japan, where he had lived and taught before writing it, and the Tokyo of the book is built from the city he knew.

The narrator is Eiji Miyake, nineteen years old, who has come from the country to Tokyo in search of his father, a man he has never met. He knows that the lawyer handling his father's affairs works in a building called the Panopticon, and the book begins with him sitting in a cafe opposite it, working up the nerve to walk in.

Each chapter is told differently from the others. Eiji's real progress towards an answer is set against his fantasies about it, and alongside those are other kinds of writing, among them a diary, a war story and a sequence that reads like a video game, so that the book is as much about how a person tells his own life to himself as about the search itself, and it is one of the most formally playful of Mitchell's novels.