Comic Strips and Bedtime Stories

Courtesy of Josh and his Kindle, I just finished Number9Dream by David Mitchell.  While I didn't love it as much as Cloud Atlas, I liked it more than The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.  The book shares a number of themes with Cloud Atlas (e.g., what does -- and doesn't -- get reported by the media, the power of corporations), and also has a dream-like* Murakami-esque feel to it.  

Some favorite passages:

"In the cities we Japanese force ourselves to live in, the question should not be, 'Why do so many of us suffer from mental illness?' but 'Why do any of us not suffer from mental illness?'"

(That should probably be true for Manhattan too.)  Also:

"At what age did.. I learn that the world is actually two: one outside, and one inside, which we call 'imagination'?  A stupendous discovery, you would have thought, but I have no memory of the day."

Finally, a discussion on why the Japanese newspapers fail to report the Yakuza wars.

"Yakuza wars make the police look useless and the politicos look corrupt.  Which, as everybody knows, is true.  But if the authorities admit it, the voters of Tokyo may be prompted to wonder why they bother paying taxes at all.  So it gets kept off TV."
          "But the newspapers?"
"Their pet journalists are fed reports of battles already won and lost higher up in the mountainside.  Original, story-sniffing journalists get black-listed from news conferences, so newspapers can't keep them. Subtle, isn't it?"
          "Then why bother with the news at all?"
"People want their comic strips and bedtime stories.  Look... a dragonfly."

* No pun intended.