I read this book a couple of years ago - I am trying to clear a way a stack of books I have not written reviews for. But I remember enjoying it a lot but felt that Mitchell's later works showed more finesse and form ("Cloud Atlas," "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet"). The novel is a playful, dream-like adventure of Eiji Miyake, a young Japanese boy from the country in Tokyo searching for his absent father. The plot is somewhat predictable but one of the fun aspects of the novel is that Eiji has a fertile imagination and many times you cannot tell if you are in a dream or in reality. It is a story of a young boy dealing with absence and loss and also a story of a traveler to Tokyo lost in the whirling fantasy of the world's largest metropolis. Recommended.