I've got problems enjoying books which've been translated from their original language. I gave up on Soul Mountain after 20 pages, quit on 100 Years of Solitude with 20 pages to go and barely held out Kafka on the Shore (maybe because I couldn't stand not knowing where the heck Murakami was going towards the end, maybe the translator did an above-par job, maybe I was more patient).

So when someone slams David Mitchell for being a Murakami rip-off, I'm saying, "It's about time!!". Number9 Dream is proving the kind of book I've been searching for. Lucid, complex (what do Yakuza members blowing each other up have to do with a Silence-of-the-Lambs-like scene in which a prisoner who claims to be God proves the truth of his identity to his interrogator?), verboise, un/cyber-real (one page the main character is laser-battlin drones, another he's being swallowed by an alligator in a massive city-wide flood), weird(!), philosophical at times (can the meaning of life be both unique to individuals and shifting with said individuals' life-situations?). It doesn't hurt that this book was nominated for the Booker in 2001 (as was Cloud Atlas in 2004).

I think a book like Number9 highlights, for me at least, the importance of being a master of diverse disciplines. I just gave a short presentation on the need to become "adaptive experts" (high in both innovation AND efficiency), instead of the common "routine expert" (good at what he does best but hopeless in everything else).

Mitchell is an adaptive expert to the max, his one book demonstrating his casual mastery of multiple genres: fantasy, sci-fi, romance, "magical realism", letter-writing (a'la Blind Assasin), football, computer-hacking, even comedy.

No doubt Mitchell knows reality enough to make it his page on which he writes life to its fullest.