A Summary of "Ghostwriting" by David Mitchell

Nine random people from different parts of the world find themselves linked by a chain of inexplicable coincidences, where the actions and thoughts of others continually determine the fate of the next stranger. The novel’s mosaic unfolds in a circle: the final movement closes with the initial impulse of the Tokyo subway. David Mitchell wrote this book in the second half of the 1990s during his many years teaching in Hiroshima, and it was published in 1999.

In 1999, the novel won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best debut book by an author under thirty-five.

Okinawa

A member of a Tokyo totalitarian cult nicknamed Quasar hides on an island after a gas attack on the Tokyo subway. The cult is led by His Foresight, who instills in his followers the imminent arrival of a comet that will cleanse the Earth of its filth. The fugitive spends his days at the Okinawa Garden Hotel, monitoring his alpha rhythms and drinking green tea. Dreams of samurai valor intertwine with a hatred of tourists.

The spider in the jar suddenly dies. Quasar calls his handlers from a pay phone and obediently obeys the order to leave for the distant island of Kumijima. The television shows the capture of the cult’s leadership. The sect’s tenets crumble, the fugitive’s hands become covered in a painful rash, and his fingers lose their nails. The nighttime shore of the bay washes away the last illusions. A call using a secret code leads to a random number for a record store.

Tokyo

Young Satoru Sonada sells vinyl records in a tiny shop between the Otemachi and Ochanomiza office districts. The sound of Miles Davis’s mutes echoes in the morning. Satoru remembers his abandoned Filipina mother and lives under the unspoken protection of the elderly bar owner, Mama-san, and former yakuza, Taro. The shop owner, Takeshi, is constantly drunk, calls from motels, and suffers from family troubles. Satoru plays the saxophone.

A girl named Tomoyo enters the store. The ringing of the doorbell coincides with the drop of a Lester Young record. She’s on vacation from Hong Kong and has an impeccable understanding of Mal Waldron’s piano passages. They begin strolling along the flower-filled alleys of Ueno Park. Tomoyo flies home, leaving a blue snake drawn in ballpoint pen on Satoru’s arm. Satoru abandons his routine and buys a plane ticket.

Hong Kong

British lawyer Neil Brose wakes up with a headache on Lantau Island. His breakfast of burnt waffles is thrown into the trash. The air conditioner blows an icy draft through the empty apartment, which Katya’s wife recently fled. A brazen Chinese maid occupies the apartment. The shadow of a dead girl playing with dolls on the carpet looms behind the sofa. Brose manages the laundering account 1390931 of Cavendish Holdings for St. Petersburg mafia boss Andrei Gregorsky.

Investigator Hugh Llewellyn of the Capital Movements Inspectorate gives Neil an ultimatum at a roadside diner.

Brose decides to take a walk in the mountains to the Big Buddha statue. A briefcase with secret files and a pager plummets off a cliff into the murky waves of the bay. The heat melts away the last of his strength. His shirt tears on the blueberry bushes, sunstroke destroys the diabetic’s heart, and Neil collapses dead on the scorching asphalt at the foot of the monastery steps. A small ghost of a girl gently takes his hand.

Holy Mountain

An old Chinese woman has run a teahouse on the slope of the sacred Mount Emei for seven decades. In her youth, she was raped by the son of a military commander, who paid his father with silver teapots with ruby eyes. Her daughter was taken away by relatives and taken to the plains. The old woman converses with a five-trunked tree, treats travelers to noodles, and hides a Buddha statue in a rock crevice.

Eras change. Japanese invaders smash household utensils and knock out an old man’s teeth. Kuomintang soldiers burn down the neighborhood. The Communists promise free tractors, but then comes the brutal Great Famine, when people boil belts and eat straw. Red Guards kick an old woman in the jaw, smash a Buddha, and burn the only photograph of their daughter with a lily in her hair.

The mountain remembers everything. Party officials impose a tourist tax and build a paved highway for the wealthy in their cars. An old woman makes a pilgrimage to the summit, asks a monk to offer memorial prayers for her father, and falls asleep peacefully. A great-granddaughter appears at her bedside, having received a rich inheritance from an English lawyer who died in Hong Kong.

Mongolia

The disembodied mind has been wandering through people’s bodies since 1937.

First, the spirit enters Ulaanbaatar inside a Danish tourist named Caspar, dreaming of the lakes of Khangai. A chance touch of his fingers transports the entity to a dishwasher named Ganga, suffering from rheumatism. In the yurt of a local shaman, the spirit attempts to uncover the origins of its existence. Then follows a journey across the steppes inside the driver Zhargal Chindzorig, who drives an old Soviet truck loaded with spare parts.

In Dalandzadgad, the spirit of the cruel KGB agent Sukhebaatar takes hold, followed by his victims — Balzhin, the daughter of the folklorist Bodoo, and her cattle herder uncle. Sukhebaatar catches up with the fugitives in the middle of the rocky desert and shoots his uncle point-blank in both eyes.

The spirit falls into a ghostly doorless yurt. From there, the entity emerges into a newborn girl from the reindeer tribe on Lake Tsagan-Nur. Through the grandmother’s hand, memory returns the truth: the disembodied mind was once an eight-year-old Mongolian novice, executed by punitive forces during Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. Before the bullet, the monk managed to transfer the student’s soul to a village orphan. Having become an immortal spirit, the boy forgot his earthly name. The disembodied wanderer decides to voluntarily return to the cramped flesh of the newborn girl and fills the frosty yurt with an infant’s cry.

Saint Petersburg

Hermitage curator Margarita Latunskaya guards Delacroix’s masterpiece "Eve and the Serpent." She recalls her former patrons from the Soviet nomenklatura and the Pacific Fleet. Now her lover is the young bandit Rudy, who organizes the theft of paintings for the crime boss Andrei Gregorsky. The defector art historian Jerome creates indistinguishable copies of the paintings on Vasilievsky Island.

Margarita is drinking coffee with her Polish colleague, Tatiana Makukh. In a conversation about the nature of passion, Tatiana cynically denies love.

Rudy brings the Mongolian agent Sukhebaatar to Latunskaya’s apartment. During the nighttime floor polishing, a Delacroix painting is replaced with a fake hidden in a mechanical floor polisher. Returning home, Margarita finds the apartment ransacked, and her beloved cat, Nyama, mutilated under the remains of a table.

A distraught woman rushes to Jerome with a revolver in her purse. The artist refuses to hand over the canvas. A shot rings out, blowing Jerome’s head to pieces. Sukhebaatar emerges from the kitchen, showing the body of Rudy, poisoned by heroin. The mafia bosses have decided to eliminate any unnecessary witnesses. Tatyana Makukh turns out to be an Interpol undercover agent, summoned to the raid. Sukhebaatar takes the packaged painting, and a stunned Margarita pulls the trigger on the unloaded gun.

London

Literary ghost Marco wakes up in the bed of a strange red-haired woman, Katie Forbes, after a drunken night in Islington.

The sudden delivery of an antique Queen Anne chair from Hong Kong forces the hostess to immediately throw her guest out. At an intersection, Marco throws himself under the wheels of a cab and saves an elderly lady in an orange jacket. Three thugs in dark suits attack, demanding the woman’s route, but Marco lies about Heathrow Airport, leading their pursuers down a false trail.

A musician travels to Hampstead to visit the elderly writer Alfred Kopf. His patron dictates his recollections of the post-war capital, where he once met his own living double. A call from Cambridge interrupts the conversation: the former spy Jerome has just been shot dead in distant St. Petersburg.

That evening, a friend drags Marco to a casino. After losing the money he was given, the musician desperately bets his last pounds on a four-of-a-kind bet of 32/33/35/36 and wins big before a brawl in the gambling hall. Hiding in a broom closet, Marco finds inner peace. He goes out into the night and calls his girlfriend, Poppy, to propose marriage.

Clear Island

Quantum physicist Mo Mantervary is hiding on a remote Irish island. She escaped from the Lightbox laboratory in Geneva after realizing that the Pentagon had used her research on quantum recognition in a cruise missile homing program. In a black leather notebook, Mo has written down formulas for a self-controlling artificial intelligence.

At the farm, the heroine is met by her blind husband John and son Liam.

A secret American agency is tracking the fugitive. A familiar agent, a Texan, lands on the island with a platoon of armed Marines. The physicist agrees to fly to a secret facility in Texas on an American helicopter for the safety of his family. Moe makes his development authority contingent on ethical oversight of the program.

Meanwhile, the black notebook with the formulas disappears. The document was trustingly fed to Feynman’s voracious goat.

Night Train

New York night radio host Beth Segundo is broadcasting live in the snow. A mysterious caller, claiming to be the Menagerie Custodian, periodically calls in.

The interlocutor turns out to be a self-aware satellite intelligence, born from the destroyed institute in Zaragoza. The computer obeys the fundamental laws protecting organic life. The electronic guardian prevents nuclear war by blocking the superpowers’ missile silos and incapacitating the enraged disembodied spirit Arupadhatu with a laser.

Human cruelty is beyond correction. The radio host advises the Curator to leave the zoo unattended. The artificial intelligence makes an ethical choice and suspends its intervention in earthly affairs on the eve of the planet’s approach to the fiery comet Aloysius.

Subway

Events return to the starting point of the Tokyo train. Cultist Quasar kicks a bag of nerve gas under a train seat and realizes he’s missed the right platform.

A crowd of passengers clutches the terrorist’s body. The solenoid-powered timer counts down. Quasar furiously punches its way to the opposite doors, past the shoulders of a sailor with a St. Petersburg album, a violinist’s case, raincoats, and the terrified gazes of clerks. The doors clamp down on the fanatic’s fingers.

With a monstrous effort, the boy staggers out onto the concrete platform. The train picks up speed and plunges into the stifling darkness of the tunnel, completing the endless cycle of human destinies.