Number9Dream: A Novel

During Anju’s and my dinosaur period, we found a theory claiming the great extinction occurred because the dinosaurs gagged to death on their own dung. We laughed for an hour, nonstop. Trying to get anywhere in Tokyo, the theory no longer seems so laughable. I feel I am gagging to death here. I hate its sidewalk-to-rooftop advertising, its capsules

A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.

“What does your mother think?” “My mother? ‘Think’? Not since her honeymoon. What she says is ‘Obey your father!’ Over and over. She let him finish her sentences for her for so long that now he starts them too. She actually apologizes to my father for making him yell at her.

Voorman laughs until his bed squeaks. “I rendered an entire country nonexistent, Doctor! What more evidence do you need?” “Then what is God doing straitjacketed in the PanOpticon?” Voorman yawns in a well-fed way. “Honolulu gets boring, Doctor. Golf is tedious when you can guarantee holes-in-one. Existence starts to drag. I put myself into prison f

“Ueno Station,” Aoyama replays his grave spiel, “is an extraordinary machine. One of the finest-tuned timepieces in the land. In the world. And this fireproof, thiefproof office is one of the nerve centers. From this console I can access . . . nearly everything. Ueno Station is our lives, Miyake. You serve it, it serves you. It affords a timetabled

damage. Not

After the head of the thunder god vanishes into the ocean, I skirt the ridge above my grandmother’s house. No light is on. An autumn morning, when rain is always ten minutes away. I climb. Waterfalls without names, waxy leaves, berries in jade pools. I climb. Boughs sag, ferns fan, roots trip. I climb. I eat peanuts and oranges, to make sure I can

I wonder how I would have fared in the war. Could I have calmly stayed in an iron whale cruising toward my death? I am the same age as my great-uncle when he died. I guess I would not have been “I.” I would have been another “I.” A weird thought, that—I am not made by me, or my parents, but by the Japan that did come into being. Subaru Tsukiyama wa

Now I understand what fuels dronehood. This: you work or you drown in debt and the underclass. Tokyo turns you into a bank balance with a carcass in tow. The size of this single number dictates where the carcass may live, what it drives, how it dresses, who it sucks up to, who it may date and marry, whether it cleans itself in a gutter or a Jacuzzi