The days of summer are numbered. As Eiji Miyake’s twentieth birthday nears, he arrives in Tokyo with a mission – to find the father he has never met.

number9dream follows Eiji on a search that leads through the seething city’s underworld, its lost property offices and video arcades; through his own imaginings, dreams and memories; via his alcoholic mother’s letters, the manuscript of an attic fabulist, and the journal of a wartime torpedo pilot; to encounters with a syndicate of organ harvesters, John Lennon, and the god of thunder; and finally back to the rainy southern island of Yakushima, where everything that matters to Eiji began and ended.

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.