The fourth chapter centers on a Chinese woman and her tea shack on Mount Emei.

He dies in diabetic shock while climbing a hill towards the Tian Tan Buddha. Following this and a police investigation into the bank account, Brose suffers a breakdown. A chance meeting with Satoru and Tomoyo leads Brose to meditate on the end of his own marriage. In the third chapter, Neal Brose, an expatriate lawyer in Hong Kong, is asked to manage a secret bank account. Satoru struggles to balance his complicated family life as an orphan, musical ambitions, societal pressure to begin a career, and his infatuation with Tomoyo, a new customer in the shop. The next chapter focuses on Satoru, a young Philippino-Japanese record shop worker in downtown Tokyo with a deep love for jazz music. His efforts to remain reclusive are hampered by the friendliness of the town's other inhabitants. This first chapter follows Quasar, a member of a millenarianist doomsday cult, attempting to evade capture in Okinawa after releasing nerve agents into a Tokyo subway train.

The main characters, though strangers to one another, become connected through their actions and relationships. The novel is written in a series of changing first-person perspectives. There are also hints and references to other works, most prominently from Isaac Asimov and the Three Laws of Robotics towards the end of the book, as well as Wild Swans by Jung Chang and The Music of Chance by Paul Auster. the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway). Ghostwritten is the product of a number of influences, particularly from East Asian culture and superstition, as well as real events remodelled for plot purposes (e.g. Many of the themes from Ghostwritten continue in Mitchell’s subsequent novels, number9dream and Cloud Atlas, and a character later appears in The Bone Clocks. It is written episodically each chapter details a different story and central character, although they are all interlinked through seemingly coincidental events. The story takes place mainly around East Asia, but also moves through Russia, Britain, the USA and Ireland. Published in 1999, it won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was widely acclaimed. Ghostwritten is the first novel published by English author David Mitchell.

Cloud atlas novel by david mitchell