Ghostwritten

David Mitchell's debut novel comprises nine interconnected narratives set around the world, linked by overlaps of character, coincidence, and theme.

"Okinawa" introduces Quasar (real name Keisuke Tanaka), a member of a Japanese doomsday cult called the Fellowship, who has just participated in a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway. He checks into a hotel in Naha under a false name, believing himself a holy warrior for His Serendipity, the cult's leader. In flashback, he recalls surrendering everything to the Fellowship after a childhood of relentless bullying, and the attack itself: He placed nerve agent on a crowded train and exited as a baby girl in a Minnie Mouse cap smiled at him from her mother's back. Ordered to lie low, Quasar relocates to the remote island of Kumejima, where news reveals that His Serendipity has been arrested and the Fellowship dismantled. His faith cracks as the baby's face haunts him and the island community draws him in.

"Tokyo" follows Satoru, a 19-year-old half-Filipino orphan who works in a jazz record shop, where music serves as his refuge in an overwhelming city. A half-Chinese girl named Tomoyo enters the shop, and over several weeks they fall quietly in love. When Tomoyo returns to Hong Kong, Satoru plans to follow. A wrong-number phone call, actually Quasar's coded emergency message to the Fellowship, keeps Satoru in the shop just long enough for Tomoyo to reappear before she leaves.

"Hong Kong" follows Neal Brose, a 31-year-old British financial lawyer who has been laundering money for a Russian crime figure named Andrei Gregorski on instructions from his employer, Sir Denholme Cavendish. His wife Katy has left him after their marriage collapsed over infertility and the presence of a ghost, a little girl haunting their Lantau Island apartment. Neal skips work and wanders the island, reflecting on a warning from Huw Llewellyn of the Capital Transfer Inspectorate, an anti-money-laundering body, that he is being set up as a scapegoat. The previous evening, he observed Satoru and Tomoyo in a coffee bar and envied their youth. Neal climbs toward the Big Buddha, increasingly delirious from undiagnosed diabetes, and collapses. The ghost girl takes his hand and leads him into the light, implying his death.

"Holy Mountain" spans nearly a century in the voice of an unnamed old woman who runs a tea shack on a sacred mountain in China. Raped as a girl by a warlord's son, to whom her father sold her for two tea bowls, she bore a daughter, sent away to conceal the shame, and rebuilt her life through Japanese occupation, Communist revolution, the Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution. A tree beside her shack speaks to her, offering comfort; as the Mongolia chapter reveals, this tree is a bodiless entity inhabiting its branches. In her old age, a great-granddaughter arrives from Hong Kong, having prospered with money left by a deceased foreign employer who proves to be Neal Brose. The old woman dies peacefully.

"Mongolia" introduces the novel's most unusual narrator: a noncorpum, a bodiless sentient entity that inhabits human minds through physical contact. It has existed for 60 years, carrying a Mongolian folktale about three animals who contemplate the fate of the world. It searches for the story's source, tracing a lead to a folklorist named Bodoo in southern Mongolia. A former host, KGB agent Suhbataar, breaks free and murders Bodoo's brother while the noncorpum still inhabits the brother's body; Suhbataar then kills Bodoo as well. The noncorpum is reborn into a newborn baby girl in a remote reindeer-herding tribe. Within the grandmother-midwife's memory, it discovers its origin: in 1937, during Stalinist purges of monasteries, a monk transferred his eight-year-old novice's consciousness into a girl just before the boy was executed. The grandmother reveals that the baby is dying, born as the noncorpum's vessel, a body without a soul. The entity must choose between immortal freedom and mortal life. It chooses the baby, and the infant's wail fills the tent.

"Petersburg" centers on Margarita Latunsky, a gallery attendant at the Hermitage museum involved in an art theft ring. Her lover Rudi, a young gangster, provides cover through his cleaning company; Jerome, a stranded British ex-spy, paints forgeries; and Gregorski arranges buyers. Their target is a Delacroix painting, Eve and the Serpent. The heist succeeds, but Margarita returns home to find her apartment ransacked and her cat mutilated and dying. At Jerome's apartment, she shoots him dead. Suhbataar, now working for Gregorski, emerges from the kitchen where Rudi lies poisoned on Gregorski's orders for embezzling. Suhbataar takes the painting and leaves, having already emptied Margarita's gun. She is left framed for murder, her dreams destroyed.

"London" follows Marco, a drummer and ghostwriter, through a single day. He wakes after a one-night stand with Katy Forbes, Neal Brose's ex-wife, who mentions that Neal died of undiagnosed diabetes in Hong Kong. Marco saves an Irish woman from a speeding taxi, is accosted by mysterious agents, and visits his elderly client Alfred, a Hungarian Jew whose autobiography he is ghostwriting. During the visit, news arrives that Jerome has been killed in Petersburg. Marco also visits his literary agent, Tim Cavendish, whose brother is Denholme Cavendish, Neal's employer. That evening, after gambling at a casino and hiding in a cleaning cupboard during a brawl, Marco has a moment of clarity. He phones his girlfriend Poppy and proposes marriage. After a tense pause, Poppy agrees to let him come over.

"Clear Island" follows Mo Muntervary, an Irish quantum physicist on the run from the Pentagon. Her research in quantum cognition, recorded in a leather-bound black book, could create a weapons system rendering nuclear technology obsolete. Mo fled Switzerland, hid in Hong Kong in Huw Llewellyn's apartment, traveled across China and Mongolia, and returned to Clear Island off County Cork, where her blind husband John Cullin and son Liam live. When a Texan general arrives with marines to claim Mo and the black book, she reveals she has fed the book to the family goat, forcing him to negotiate. She agrees to go on the condition that she retains full autonomy over her research. John insists on accompanying her, and they depart by helicopter.

"Night Train" is structured as transcripts from a late-night New York radio show hosted by Bat Segundo. A caller identifying as "the Zookeeper" describes using satellite technology to intervene in global affairs: It destroyed Installation 5 in Saragosa, the facility weaponizing Mo's research, and during a near-nuclear-war event called Brink Day, it disabled all advanced weapons systems on both sides. But its interventions breed new crises. The noncorpum from Mongolia, now calling itself Arupadhatu, interrupts a broadcast and proposes an alliance to govern humanity; the Zookeeper neutralizes it. In a final exchange, the Zookeeper describes soldiers who have massacred a village and asks Bat whether it should destroy their convoy to prevent another atrocity. Bat advises destroying a bridge instead. The Zookeeper says it knows what to do; the opportunity arrives in 13 days, coinciding with Comet Aloysius's approach toward Earth.

The brief final chapter, "Underground," returns to Quasar on the subway at the moment of the gas attack. Trapped against the wrong doors, he fights through the crowd. Fragments of the novel's other narratives flash through his mind: a saxophone, a tea shack, Mongolian grasslands, a Petersburg guidebook, a London map, a whisky label depicting an island. He wrenches free through the closing doors as the train accelerates into darkness with its cargo of passengers and poison. Someone blows on the nape of his neck. He swings around. Nothing is there.