As a boy, in answer to the traditional "and what do you want to be when you grow up" David Mitchell, then addicted to the Professor Brainstawm books, would say he wanted to be an inventor. Now aged 30, that ambition has come true, though not perhaps in the way he expected.
"I think the right thing for any individual to do is something that they have always done. When I was a kid I was really into The Lord of the Rings - all those Hobbits. I used to doodle and make fantasy maps of fantasy lands in my head and spend weeks on them. I would draw atlases, page after page. I would think of seasons and coasts and tides and the names of the cities and describe the people who lived there. In a sense that was utilising the same part of me when I was 11 or 12 that I'm utilising now.
"Now I'm doing the same but with words. The point is the right thing for you to do is what you've always done. It just may have been in a form that you didn't recognise." It wasn't until he was 25 that Mitchell knew he was a writer. Still, the early journeys into his imagination bore fruit and his first novel, Ghostwritten, takes the reader to worlds as mysterious and unknown as those of Tolkien, both in the geographical sense and, more importantly, into the mindworlds of his nine narrators who include an Irish nuclear physicist (female), a Mother-Courage style Chinese peasant, a live-fast die-young English lawyer caught in a tightening vice of deceit in Hong Kong, a blowsy, self-deluding gangster's moll in post-Soviet St Petersburg, and a mind without a body that roams the world moving from host to host searching for memory, who we meet among peasants in Mongolia. Each story exists independently, yet each is part of the whole.
Ghostwritten begins and ends in Japan, where the narrator is a member of the cult that carried out the mass gassing in the Tokyo underground in 1994 - not that Mitchell dares name it. The cult is still alive and well and death threats are common and indeed carried out. He hopes that, by the time Ghostwritten is translated into Japanese, he will be safely living elsewhere.
Mitchell has lived in Japan since 1994.
To supplement his grant while at Kent University he had taught English "at one of the less reputable language schools" and fell in love with a Japanese girl. He now teaches English to engineers in an extremely respectable university in Hiroshima. The gas attack changed the Japanese's view of themselves for ever, Mitchell believes. Until then the feeling was that Japan was safe. "It happened the first year I arrived. If you go outside Japan you take your chances. While you're in Japan only earthquakes will happen to you. Japan equals safety - it's in the bedrock of their psyche. Then, for the first time ever this terrible thing happened, this man-mad thing, not American-made, not Russian made, not Chinese made. It came from the heart of their society and these weren't marginalised people."
The young man who sits opposite me appears as English as you get, gaunt in the boy-model manner, with a slight stammer, wanting-to-please smile and nice line in self-deprecating humour. Born into middle-class economic stability in Southport north of Liverpool, he still retains the short "a" of a northern accent. How, I ask, was he able to such a remarkable degree to get into the mindset of the Japanese, perhaps the most unknowable of any people? He laughs: "It's an illusion. It's a book. It's nothing but writing, and I fooled you and that's wonderful and I love doing it and people like it being done to them. I think Graham Greene said that one of the major skills involved in writing is disguising what you can't do. The impact writing has on the reader is a little like the impact of a card shark on his or her victim."
The decision to become a writer was made when Mitchell was 25. He felt himself drifting into the life of an academic and realised it wasn't what he wanted. "The problem with criticism is it's words about words. Academics are one stage removed: it's words about words about words."
Disillusion set in when he was doing his MA in comparative literature which he explains is about writers about whom academics haven't got round to writing, "people like Milan Kundera, Ital Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges. Ask any academic to write a book on them and they'll run a mile." Nothing to do with quality, Mitchell explains, just that they haven't been dead long enough.
"Anyone can read a book and have a perfectly valid opinion on it. Academics need to read other people's opinions and, only after the writer has been dead for a sufficient length of time is there enough goo, enough critical papers, volumes, books published on the writer for them to be able to read those and make a critique of the critiques."
He laughs when I ask about the subject of his thesis and the stammer returns. "I'm going to have to use an absurd American accent," he says, "because it is so pretentious." So, he does in the manner of Frasier's brother, Niles: "Levels of reality in the post-modern novel," then winces.
No doubt the construction of Ghostwritten, the layering of reality and fantasy put it firmly into the post-modern category. David Mitchell certainly plays games: each story is written in a different genre - thriller, romance, science fiction etc - but the intention, and the effect, is to extend the reader's enjoyment rather than expand the author's ego. Tautly plotted and with the page-turning qualities of a thriller, Ghostwritten is an intoxicating read and is in danger of giving the post-modern novel a good name.
Its genesis came by way of an earlier attempt to write fiction. "The first couple of years in Japan I wrote a big, long ugly first novel," he says. "It was an attempt to write a western set novel using a Japanese, Heian-period 9th-12th century, system of writing. Arguably the first novel in the world was a book written at that time called The Tale of Genji by Lady Molasakori. One of her contemporaries was a writer called Sei Shonagon, who wrote The Pillow Book that more people will have heard of. I loved those books. I was interested in trying to do something in that style. But it really couldn't be done and end up with a commercially viable book."
However, it was good enough to attract the attention of one of the 20 agents and publishers to whom he sent extracts - this agent asked to see anything else he might have written. By then Mitchell had written first five chapters of Ghostwritten. One chapter, Mongolia, was selected for inclusion in this year's New Writing 8, sponsored by the British Council and published by Vintage. A two-book deal from Sceptre came fast on its heels.
The second book is now well underway but Mitchell plans to see out his teaching contract in Hiroshima - there's another 18 months to run. Rent is cheap, he says, and he manages to save three quarters of his salary. Then he wants to travel and is taking nothing for granted, certainly not commercial success.
"I love being abroad - life seems to improve when I go abroad. I've just been reading The Beach by Alex Garland and there's a bit where he describes the wonderful moment when you're on a plane, and the fasten-seat-belt light goes off. Ping! And it's true - everything that you've left behind falls away. I don't have to worry about that any more. It's gone. I love that feeling and I love living in it."
Ghostwritten by David Mitchell, published by Sceptre at £10 in UK.