Looking For Reality

Eiji Miyake is searching for a father he's never met, whose name he doesn't know. To track Dad down, he considers using lies, truths, computers and guns; in the end his most effective weapon is a pizza. In Number9Dream (Random House; 400 pages), David Mitchell returns to a setting from his widely acclaimed 1999 debut, Ghostwritten: a dystopian and dysfunctional Japan, one-part William Gibson, two-parts Murakami—Ryu and Haruki. Like a cyberage Holden Caulfield, 19-year-old, fresh-from-the-countryside Miyake plods his way through Tokyo's cityscape, rubbing elbows with Uber-hackers, war veterans, playboys and yakuza -cum-spiritualists. Along the way he gets lost, kidnapped, chased, stoned, hired...