David mitchell author2/21/2023 ![]() ![]() Yet he turned out not as some navel-gazing avant-gardist but a euphoric virtuoso of styles and formats. Add to that the self-awareness of former language teacher, and you have “three types of innocence lost”. When you’re a kid and you stammer, you have to evolve this skill for survival in order to avoid the stammer words.” Now, in his bilingual family, “you do live and speak within the fact that human beings in their near-boundless diversity have evolved a whole bunch of different languages”. Bilingualism, he reflects, “amplifies what a stammer already does, which is to make you very aware that there are many tracks up the mountain of one particular meaning. The family speak both English and Japanese at home, in a “70:30 ratio”. Here, you grasp, is someone who has had to think long and hard about language in all its glory and treachery. Just once or twice, you notice a fleet-footed swerve around some verbal stumbling-block. Equally well-known are Mitchell’s childhood ordeals with stammering. Last year, he collaborated with his wife on the translation of a Japanese memoir of autism, Naoki Higashida’s The Reason I Jump: their son has the condition. I lack the necessary emotional stamina to service a large circle of friends.” He adds, laughing: “It would be unrepresentative to suggest that I’m Grizzly Adams raising Grizzly Adams-type children. I’m not at ease in large groups of people. “As you get older, you gravitate towards a lifestyle which is in tune with your clearer understanding of who you are. The country life, 45 minutes from Cork’s airport (“as long as you’re not stuck behind a tractor”), suits them. After a period back in England, Mitchell moved to West Cork in Ireland, where he lives near Clonakilty with his Japanese wife, Keiko Yoshida, and their son and daughter. He studied literature at Kent University and then (after a spell in Sicily) went to Japan to teach for eight years. Born in Southport in 1969, he grew up in Malvern, with two commercial-artist parents who taught him that imagination could pay the bills. However airborne and globalised his art, its creator likes to keep firm ground beneath his feet. When Howard Hodgkin paints a Kermit-green slash next to an iridescent orange, there is that line – a dark line between the green and the orange that exists only on your optic nerve. If you put one of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues next to “ Perfect Day” by Lou Reed, a third thing is made that spills over into each. When we used to make mixtapes for prospective girlfriends in the Eighties, we knew this. He argues that with “brow-lessness or genre-lessness, there’s a big payback… I think that when you put things next to each other, a third thing is made. Once dubbed the “British Murakami”, he has never disowned an early debt to the equally protean Japanese master, but long ago went his own way. ![]() He fast disproved the grumble of his ageing enfant terrible, Crispin Hershey, in The Bone Clocks – “in publishing it’s easier to change your body than it is to switch genre” – by never having a fixed genre to switch. ![]() Eclectic, cosmopolitan, the former English teacher in Hiroshima could just about do it all. Towering talent, formidable originality and sheer entertainment joined with a fluency and confidence that mocked the anxious hierarchies and demarcations of the 20th century. Here, you felt, was the fiction of the future. From Ghostwritten on, Mitchell has looked like a novelist supremely of, and in, our mashed-up, mercurial times. ![]()
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