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Masatatsu Shibata officeshibachan — How Will I Know? Whitney Houston sings, “How will I know if he really loves me?” Pop Music asks some of the most probing questions we can imagine. Many of them are secular versions of Spirituals, Gospel Music or Hymns. How will I know if He really loves me? How will I know if He really exists? How will I know if He’s really there? What would I say if he insists? (Sorry, that last one slipped in from my review of "Glee: How to Plot an Episode in 70 Words".) To which the tabloid press add: How could I tell? And, more significantly, in the Facebook era: Who could I tell? How would I tell them? Can Anybody Find Me Somebody to Love? Freddie Mercury sings, “Can anybody find me somebody to love?” Can anybody find me somebody to love me? We need somebody to love. We need somebody to love us. Need, need, need, need, need. We are the most psychologically needy creatures ever to inhabit this Earth, but we are also the most skeptical. We need to believe, we want to believe, we want to be believed in, but we are plagued by doubt. How Could We Tell? If Jesus or God returned to Earth, how could we tell it was Him? Would we expect Him to perform a miracle? Would we ask Him to show us His wounds? What if She wore a dress? What if He wore a suit? What if She was a Democrat? (God forbid.) What if He was a Republican? (God forbids.) How would we know? How could we tell? Lift Up Your Heads, Read Joyce As probing and insightful as these questions are, there is an equally important set of literary questions. Would we recognise James Joyce if he was in our midst? What if he wasn’t wearing a hat? How should we laud him? Re-Joyce, the Lord is King On the other hand, there's the reader’s equivalent of the old chestnut: who is the next Bob Dylan? Who is the next James Joyce? Would we recognise them? Would we recognise the next “Ulysses”? Could someone in the 21st century write the greatest novel ever written? Does it have to be a (or the) Great American Novel to qualify? What if it was the Great Asian Novel? What if it wasn’t written by Haruki Murakami? (I’d have egg on my face then, wouldn’t I?) What if it was written by an Englishman? What if it was “number9dream”? 2001: A Time and Space Oddity David Mitchell released his second novel in 2001. Having read the novel twice, I wondered what the blurb had said: “David Mitchell’s second novel belongs in a Far Eastern, multi-textual, urban-pastoral, road-movie-of-the-mind, cyber-metaphysical, detective/family chronicle, coming-of-age-love-story genre of one. It is a mesmerizing successor to his highly acclaimed and prize-winning debut, “Ghostwritten’.” The blurb-writer should be sacked. This is understatement of the highest (or is it, lowest?) order. “number9dream” is a time and space oddity. But, more importantly, it is a time and space odyssey. It is a 21st century “Ulysses”. No, this is an understatement. It is the 21st century “Ulysses”. Prove It? These are Facts! “It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams”: Don DeLillo, “Americana” Proof? You want proof? Must I show you Mitchell’s wounds? Must I document all his miracles? Oh ye of little faith. Must I bury reality, so that I can disclose his dreams? OK. Prove it. Just the facts. The confidential. This case that I’ve been working on so long… On Approaching “number9dream” (A Guide for Television Fans) “First you creep Then you leap Up about a hundred feet Yet you're in so deep You could write the Book. Chirpchirp The birds They're giving you the words The world is just a feeling You undertook. Remember?” It’s Juxtaposition (I Didn’t Imagine Getting Myself Into) So, how would David Mitchell tell his story? How would he know what to say? “number9dream” is typical of Mitchell’s writing in that it is not a straight linear narrative. It collects nine (apparently) disparate chapters and juxtaposes them against each other. I have to confess that I didn’t really have a clue what was going on (and why) until the middle of Chapter 5 (“Study of Tales”). Up until then, Mitchell seemed to be just assembling his paints and brushes on the table, getting everything ready, drawing an outline, only no picture was emerging. But is it too much to expect a reader to wait 250 pages before they start to get it? I think of Mitchell as a mosaic artist. I see him as an author who might feel that meaning and society have become fragmented or broken, but whose counter-strategy is to fix it by making it whole again. He is one of a group of artists who shepherds us from disintegration to integration. Individually and socially. As long as people feel that alienation is not a natural or desirable state, I will look to culture and artists like Mitchell for this experience and outcome. Yet, I had started to believe that this work might be an artistic failure, that he was trapped in mere juxtaposition. The chapters didn’t seem to be conversing, they weren’t informing each other, they weren’t relating to each other. It was only in chapter 5 that the mosaic started to take shape for me. Father On Up the Road Eiji Miyake is a 20-year old boy from the country who now lives in Tokyo. His father abandoned his family when he was very young. His twin sister, Anju, died nine years ago when they were 11. Eiji’s mother became an alcoholic, and he more or less ran away from home. It’s about time he started to make something of his life. In a way, Eiji is a composite of both Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom from Joyce’s “Ulysses”. Eiji and Stephen are on a quest to find a biological or metaphorical father, to flesh out, contextualise and complete a family. Eiji and Bloom are on a quest to consummate or repair a sexual relationship, which in Eiji’s case will mark the completion of his passage through adolescence (in the same way it does in Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood”). Joyce took 18 Episodes, Mitchell takes nine Chapters (one of which is wordless, apart from the digit “9”). Joyce’s work is structurally modeled on Homer’s “Odyssey”. Mitchell’s work takes “Ulysses” and leaps from it into a postmodern waterfall of meanings. Only, paradoxically, like “Alice in Wonderland”, he leaps upwards rather than diving downwards – hence, “First you creep/Then you leap/Up about a hundred feet/Yet you're in so deep/ You could write the Book”. Playing with Some Ballpark Figures of Speech While Joyce explores different styles of writing in each Episode, Mitchell’s pyrotechnics are on display throughout. However, the stylistic resemblance is most apparent in Chapter 5, where Mitchell playfully works his way through as many figures of speech as he can in the space of 66 pages (alliteration, assonance, consonance, euphony, hyperbole, puns, rhyme, probably many more that I’ll leave you to detect). This happens to be a chapter in which Mitchell conjures a novel within a novel and the character in the internal novel realises that he is being written. It’s important that you not take him too seriously. He’s not using purple prose to display his intellectualism. He’s playing with words in the most Joycean or Nabokovian fashion. ”First frost floated a wafer of ice on edelweiss wine.” ”The fourth noise, the whisperings which Goatwriter was waiting for, was still a way away, so Goatwriter rummaged for his respectable spectacles to leaf through a book of poems composed by Princess Nukada in the ninth century.” ”Suddenly the sky screamed at the top of its lungs.” (Note the Pynchoneque screaming.) ”A hoochy-koochy hooker honked.” Then there are sentences you just read for the pleasure: ”The naked eyeball of the sun stared unblinkingly from a sky pinkish with dry heat.” ”A desert wind did nothing to cool the world it wandered through.” ”The road ran as straight as a mathematical constant to the vanishing point.” ”A quorum of quandom quokkas thumped off as Pithecanthropus flexed his powerful biceps, drummed his treble-barrelled chest and howled a mighty roar.” Don’t worry if they don’t appeal to you. There are plenty of other jelly beans in the packet. There’s bound to be a flavour that you’ll savour. Lookin' for Soul Food (and a Place to Eat) Of course, sooner or later, one of us must know that Mitchell’s journey concerns stories and dreams. Goatwriter seeks out and tells “truly untold tales”, yet is a character in one that is being told. A character in one of Eiji’s dreams tells a story and remarks: ”Stories like that need morals. This is my moral. Trust what you dream. Not what you think.” An Ogre in Eiji’s dream warns, “Be very careful what you dream.” An old lady exchanges persimmons for dreams that give her nourishment and replenish her soul: ”You are too modern to understand. A dream is a fusion of spirit and matter. Fusion releases energy – hence sleep, with dreams, refreshes. In fact, without dreams, you cannot hold on to your mind for more than a week. Old ladies of my longevity feed on the dreams of healthy youngsters such as yourself.” ”Dreams are the shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Beaches where the yet-to-be, the once were, the will-never-be may walk amid the still-are.” In a world of telephones, televisions, computers, technology, we have lost touch with the tactile and the spiritual, we have become too analytical and serious. We have lost our sense of humour and absurdity and play. We are not being refreshed the way we need to be. We are consuming too many spirits of an alcoholic nature and too little soul food. number9dream (Lennon’s on Sale Again) Of course, “#9 Dream” is the name of a John Lennon song, and Lennon features in the novel. Eiji plays guitar and learns how to play all of John Lennon’s songs. He meets Lennon in a dream and discusses the meaning of three songs: “Tomorrow Never Knows”, "Norwegian Wood” and “#9 Dream”. Eiji asks Lennon about the meaning of “Tomorrow Never Knows”. John jokes, “I never knew” (and they “giggle helplessly”). John explains that the song wrote him, rather than him writing it. Character John is being a bit disingenuous here. In the song, real John advises “turn off your mind, relax and float downstream”, “lay down all thoughts and surrender to the void”, “listen to the colour of your dreams” and “play the game ‘Existence’ to the end/of the beginning”: “Love is all and love is everyone It is knowing.” These messages are consistent with the themes of the novel. Character John also reveals that “#9 Dream” is a descendant of “Norwegian Wood”. Both are ghost stories. While “Norwegian Wood” is concerned with loneliness, “#9 Dream” is concerned with harmony: “two spirits dancing so strange”. John also explains that “the ninth dream begins after every ending”. In a sense, there is a sequence of eight dreams, the eighth dream ends the first cycle and is followed by a ninth dream which starts a new cycle. This explains why chapter 9 of the novel is blank. It is an empty capsule or container for Eiji (and the reader) to fill with our new vision. After eight chapters, we have simply reached the end of the beginning. If Sex was Nine By the end of chapter 8, Eiji has completed his quests for his father and a partner, in different ways. At the very end, we see him running from the news that there has been a massive earthquake in Tokyo. Having resolved his own concerns, he must still live in a world dictated by the vagaries of Nature. He might be Mother Nature’s Son, but he cannot impose his Will on her. However, just as he might be running from disaster, he is running towards his future, hopefully towards the embrace of his new love, Ai. He is escaping from something to something else. As real John says, he is floating downstream, he is not dying. West Meets East There is much more I could say about the detail of the novel. However, I will leave that to you and to others to explore. I want to say something more about why I rate David Mitchell so highly as an author. Mitchell doesn’t just write within the Western literary tradition. His wife, Keiko (to whom he dedicated this book), is Japanese and they lived for many years in Japan. Henry James sought to understand himself by exploring the relationship between the new America and the old Europe. Joseph Conrad sought to understand the Enlightenment of Europe in contrast to the Darkness of Africa. Like John and Yoko, Mitchell works at the intersection of East and West. While at the time of writing he understood and was influenced by Murakami, he has his own distinct and unique voice. The world is not dominated by America or Europe anymore. The future will contain (already contains) Asian DNA. Mitchell understands this and has been exploring it since he first sat at a writing bureau with a pen. His Odyssey extended beyond the Middle East and discovered the Far East (sorry if I offend anyone by using that term, but it says what I need it to say in this context). Whereas Ulysses returned home to Helen of Troy and Bloom duplicated his journey internally within Dublin, Mitchell and his characters have made their home in a global village. They don’t need to return anywhere, because they are comfortable anywhere on this planet. Despite the fragmentation of society by technology and modernism, Mitchell is a Great Integrator. I said at the beginning that I wanted to make a case that Mitchell is a 21st century James Joyce. This case is closed. Postscript: ”If You'll Be My Bodyguard” On the occasion of her death during the week of this review, I want to dedicate this review to Whitney Houston, who I totally adored in “The Bodyguard”. I wore a hired uniform for a week after that film. The film was directed by Lawrence Kasdan (one of my favourite directors, who also directed “The Big Chill”, from which Kevin Costner’s role as "Alex" - the dead guy - was cut). However, the film was also an important statement about the portrayal of inter-racial romance in Hollywood, only it involved a relationship between a white man and a black woman. Hollywood hasn’t had the guts to feature a relationship between a black man and a white woman (like Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie). I’m sorry if I offend anybody by saying that. David Mitchell writes for and about a world in which the answer to the question “how will I know if he really loves me” is color-blind. All hail, David Mitchell and the ship you sail in. Genesis 9:09 (Unauthorised) "So they went into the ark with Noah, by twos, of all flesh and of all colours, in which was the breath of life."

Mike Schofield mikeschofield — I was caught off guard by how many times I laughed out loud. It is the perfect book to read on the bus - light and engaging and best in short doses. By the end, I was quite attached to all the characters and Adrian's struggles to grow up.

Anthony Lostrom anthonylostrom — Wonderful... such great writing, sympathetic characters, interesting to learn about other cultures.

Musholo Descar musholodesbde5 — What a good book! I thought that if there was a way to portray the internal dialogue of the main character, that this would make an excellent movie! This book was so real and sad, and tormenting. It really shows how hard some choices in life are, and how there is never just a simple answer.

Xmen Xmen iksmen — good textbook. interesting sources and artwork for the topics.

Viktor Qiu rammsteinc10b5 — Undoubtedly you have seen the cover of this book many times if you have ever stepped into a bookstore lately. One word describes this book: perfection. Stieg Larsson is THE most talented contemporary crime mystery/thriller writer. I am so sad to hear that he has deceased (but not before he has delivered the manuscripts for the other two sequels of this book !). I cannot even begin to imagine how one mind could have fabricated such an amazing story such as this, so complex and layered. The label "mystery novel" does not do it justice, for labeling it as a genre book debases it too much. The book transcends genres. It is a mystery only on the level of the exterior plot. The book is layered with psychological drama, rich character developments, and other themes. *whew I can rant on and on...but go read it for yourself

Igor Mello igoromelloa694 — This made me fall in love with Dickens. Pip is one of my favorite heroes out there and was the original lost orphan out to find his meaning in life. Very Harry Potter for the Victorian England generation.