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Number9Dream Published by Sceptre Paperback £10
Ghostwritten
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CHAMPAGNE BOMB BUZZ DAVID MITCHELL COMES CLEAN David Mitchell is 31 years old and his second novel is out now. He lives in Hiroshima and teaches English. He's super-talented. Sceptre is his publisher. If you write, reading him could make you want to give up. Some of the passages in Number 9 Dream are so good you forget you're looking at text. He achieves total sensurround impact. William Gibson springs to mind: those blasts of frenetic action against the backdrop of a luminous, towering city in chaos. '771e room has a fusuma screen that opens onto a balcony, Tokyo rises from the floor of the night. Now look. A six storey can of KIRIN LAGER BEER pours dandelion neon over and over. Across the unlit take of the Imperial Palace I can see aircraft warning lights pulse on the crown of PanOpticon. Altair and Vega pulse either side of the Milky Way. Traffic noises ebb up. Velvet leans out "Miles and miles," she says to herself. Her hair shifts in the hot breeze. Her body is made of curves I can feel just by looking.' You're right on that balcony with Eiji and this extraordinary creature beside you, about to smoke a joint and drink cocktails. You should read Ghostwritten and Number 9 Dream. They're trips into places you've never been. Yeah, I'm as jealous as hell. But you know, I won't be ripping David off. I'm too immersed in hyperbolic Stateside stylists. The editor reserves the right to be a pretentious bastard. Enjoy the interview.
Slate: No9 reads like a set of short stories melting into one theme, Eiji's search for his past through vaguely linked events. Mitchell: Yes and no. I wrote No9 knowing that eight semifreestanding chapters would form the whole and that each chapter would influence the knitting pattern of the next. Not unconnected scenes - I didn't sit down and work out how they'd connect later on (although I heard an interview with Jim Jarmusch on the radio saying this is how he constructs plots). Slate: Do you see all your scenarios on an interior screen? I say this because in places your book reads like a blown up movie something like Ridley Scott and Sergio Leone. Don't get offended. Mitchell: Scott and Leone? How could I be offended? Although they might be offended if they'd heard of me. I think the cinema screen is a good metaphor for the imagination (which is itself a metaphor). I thought about your question for a day or so and concluded that my imagination has two modes - cinema screen and dialogue box. Yes I do imagine big blown up (in both senses) scenarios and then write about them. But for dialogue (and monologue) it's more audio and less visual- you listen to the voices in your head, transcribe what they say and sharpen it up later with rewrites. I'd say this is commonplace. It would be fascinating to perceive another person's imagination directly, but Microsoft don't market the software yet. Slate: Could Japan ever stop fascinating you? Do you feel comfortable there - have your learnt to love the people and culture or do you feel tension at times? Mitchell: Friday to Monday I love the place, Tuesday to Thursday it makes my knuckles throb with frustration. It is possible to talk about a people with national traits but it's only possible to meet individuals, to whom universal constants of human relationships apply (even if these constants are pretty mysterious sometimes). So I can't say I love or hate - or feel indifferent to Japanese people in general - only this person or that person. Which is true anywhere. Culture is another trickier than it looks word. The larger the scale of your definition of the word, the less focus it has in terms of how you experience it. Perhaps we perceive culture as sequences of moments. And like sequences of people. some will be enriching some draining. Being cattle-wagoned on Tokyo trains or having to search for a true opinion through a forest of verbal protocol I might think no, I can't handle this culture. Getting airborne on hot sake with friends in a good sushi restaurant after work with my tie loosened on a night in early spring with illuminated cherry blossom visible through the windows and a woman with a voice like Keith Richards singing an old folk song from the Seto Inland Sea I might think Hallelujah, this culture is bliss. Which is true? I hate and love the culture according to the moment. Slate: Another idiotic question. Do you still teach? Mitchell: No idiotic questions so far. believe me. A radio interviewer once asked me: "So Dave, why is Ghostwritten complicated and not - you know like - simple?" I still teach at university which gives me enough time my employer seems happy to consider my writing "research" in the broadest sense. I was systematic in my writing habits (sell the TV and abandon all social life) before I started working here. I think most writers have been writing since infancy, even if the writing was wearing a heavy disguise. Teaching Japanese male youths obviously provided me with material for No9. Slate: The reclaimed land scene is Jon Woo on acid - the bowling ball thing is fucking grotesque. The Morino and Lizard thing - is this based on rumour or research? Is Yakuza still a powerful force in Japan, politically and economically? Mitchell: The relevant adverb to No9's criminal input is psychically. The criminal co-plot draws from the whole mythos of the Yakuza built by decades of movies, manga, novels, TV series. I think the Yakuza function as a Jungian other in the collective unconscious of Japan: We are law abiding and decent, they are not." At the same time they act as a release valve of fantasy fulfilment, they do on a daily basis to their enemies (in Kitano Takeshi's movies for instance) exactly what some stressed out office worker would like to do to his dept manager. "Oho, so you don't like the font size I chose to type up the minutes of last week's meeting, do you? Well motherfucker, let's see how you like a pair of bullets up your nostrils?" Politically and economically, sure the Yakuza are a cancer in the body of Japan and an indelible stain in the underwear of its politics, but perhaps your mag isn't best place for an expose, even if I had the wherewithal. I wouldn't to end up with a pair of bullets up my nostrils. Slate: Essentially No9 is incredibly romantic - Eiji and Ai are so doomed. It's almost as if Eiji wants Ai to be Anju, resurrected. History bashes them relentlessly. Mitchell: Yes, I consciously set out to make Eiji's lover an Anju. Your doomed history point is very interesting. I hadn't thought about the novel in this way - you have the luxury of being an observer, I'm flattered by this observation. Slate: Who do you read and love? Mitchell: Timothy Mo, Chekhov, Bulgakov, I'm reading Proust at the moment, Calvino, Muriel Spark, John Cheever, Don DeLillo, a Japanese Fabulist called Kenji Miyazawa, Haruki Murakami, Peter Carey, David Malouf. My reading tends to have a tangential spin on what I'm writing - for example I needed to do some nineteenth century ship scenes recently, so I read Golding's Sea Trilogy for flavour. Most trips I take, books I read, videos I rent, even CDs I buy, I can usually insert into the vague brackets of research. Slate: Fight Club? Mitchell: Oh please. Anyone could see that the whole Maria and Jack thing was a disguised love story. Chuck must reread The Great Gatsby every fucking weekend - the cheap, nickel-plated thief. Still, I love the idea of truck drivers ripping off Scott Fitzgerald. Hmmm, a legacy trashed. Roland Taylor |
