DAVID Mitchell made his first trip to China just before he quit teaching English in Japan and became a novelist. The author of "Cloud Atlas" backpacked around the country that he knew nothing about, accompanied by a Mandarin-speaking British friend in 1997, long before he started work on his much-acclaimed epic novel.

They stopped at a tea shack while climbing Mount Emei in Sichuan Province and met an old woman. She showed them a tree and claimed that different types of fruit grew on it.

Mitchell expanded this small encounter into the story of a mad woman who runs a tea shack in "Holy Mountain," one of the nine interwoven chapters in "Ghostwritten," his debut novel.

That 1999 book, described by some critics as one of the best first novels, is set across Japan, China, Mongolia, Britain and the United States, following the stories of a cult member and bomber, a financial lawyer troubled by ghosts, an art curator, disembodied spirits and a physicist, all written in the first person.

Speaking to Shanghai Daily, Mitchell said at the time he was undaunted by trying to write from a Chinese perspective.

"I was only 27 and I didn't consider it a problem. I'm now more aware of my own limits. I'm not Chinese. I don't speak the language. I'm just a Western observer," the 43-year-old writer said.

"I've read about China, but my impressions can't possibly be deep truths about the country. That's why she (the old tea shack owner from "Ghostwritten") is mad. Then she doesn't have to be accurate. I should be humble, and I would only describe China through the eyes of a Western character now."

Mitchell is more confident in writing from a Japanese perspective, and Japanese characters and settings are common in his novels.

"Ghostwritten" starts with a story inspired by the 1995 Tokyo subway attack, during which time Mitchell was teaching English in Hiroshima and read about the incident in newspapers.

"I'm interested in how and why. I kept imaging this young man who ran to Okinawa, the furthest he can escape to within Japan, after doing such a terrible thing. He is cut off from his brainwashers and keeps thinking maybe he was wrong. I kept wondering how he felt," Mitchell recalled.

"Number9dream" features the actual and imaginative journey of a young Japanese in search of his father and "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" explores the little known history of Dutch-Japan trade set on Dejima, in the bay of Nagasaki, in late 18th century.

In his early twenties, Mitchell met a young Japanese woman, now his wife, and followed her to Japan. He stayed there for eight years teaching English and writing novels, before returning to the West with his family in 2002. He now lives in a quiet village in Ireland with his wife and two children and describes himself a family man.

"It certainly helps with my understanding of Japanese perspectives. By teaching English, I have had the chance to meet and talk to Japanese people in a relaxed environment where they lowered their guard to foreigners," he recalled.

The author, short-listed twice for Booker Prize, is now working on his sixth novel, "set between 1979 and 2035, through the life of a girl-woman-mother-widow-old lady, who is both political and supernatural." He added that about 25 pages of it would be set in China.

In a break from writing the novel, Mitchell visited Shanghai for the annual book fair in the city, which ended on Tuesday. His schedule was also part of the cultural and art series called UK Now, organized by the British Council (operating in China as the Cultural and Education Section of the British Consulate-General).

Four of his five novels, "Ghostwritten," "Cloud Atlas," "Black Swan Green" and the latest "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet," have been translated and published in China. Mitchell's second novel, "Number9dream," what he called "my strangest and most experimental and the riskiest for my publisher," was, interestingly, left out.

It was not easy to translate his books, according to Yang Chunlei, Chinese translator of "Cloud Atlas."

The novel starts with a voyage journal of 19th century American notary Adam Ewing and delves into five other nested stories that all happen in different times and locations, from 19th century New Zealand to a dystopian near future, taking his mastering of distinct voices from "Ghostwritten" to an even higher level.

On this occasion, he not only switched between characters and places, but also time periods and jumped between various types of narrative, including journals, letters, suspense novels, correspondence and sci-fi.

Mitchell said he sees genre as a paintbox and wanted to use different colors from this paintbox in one book. "I used different styles of English to show how language evolves over time," explained the author, posing a difficult task for his translators.

"It was one of the most difficult tasks I have encountered," Mitchell's Chinese translator Yang admitted. "I got feedback saying that I was too conservative and failed to show his mastering of styles in my translation. Such feedback is quite true. I did take a more conservative approach to translating the works."

Neither was it an easy interpretation task for Hollywood to execute Mitchell's wild imaginings.

The novel's movie adaptation, the latest buzz in Hollywood due in American theaters in October, took three top directors - The Wachowskis ("The Matrix") and Tom Tykwer ("Run Lola Run") - and one of the strongest casts of the year, that includes Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon and Hugh Grant.

Famed Chinese actress Zhou Xun also makes her Hollywood debut in the film, which is expected to be shown in China as well.

The recently released trailer revealed exciting visuals on top of a sophisticated epic with juxtaposed storylines crossing genres, time and space. Reincarnation, a piece of indicated background information in the book, has been brought to the forefront to hold the movie's plot and structure together.

"The directors have done a good job. The structure had to be changed and the film is different from the book, which is a good thing," said Mitchell, who took no part in the film's script writing and admires the directors' previous works.

"Often an adaptation fails because it is just an exact copy of the book. This one is not. It is the directors' interpretation. It is more like a mosaic and less symmetrical. And it is a good interpretation."

In general, though, the writer prefers literature over cinema and traditional over digital methods of reading. He describes cinema as an invention that satisfies human beings' desire for stories, but finds the excitement from reading a book lasts longer.

"When you watch a movie, the screen is much bigger than you are, but it comes to you. You experience it for 120 minutes and it goes away," he explained.

"Compared with that, even though a book is much smaller than you are, if it's well-written, then you go into it. You inhabit in it for days, months and years. And then you leave the book, you are no longer the same person."

On his flight to China this month, Mitchell read stories by established Chinese writer Su Tong, whose "Wives and Concubines" was adapted into one of the most internationally recognized Chinese movies, "Raise the Red Lantern" by Zhang Yimou.

The British and Chinese writers held a dialogue on the subject "How to Build a Fictional House." Mitchell also met other Chinese writers during part of his visit spent in Beijing. He was described as "super-humble and passionate" in these meetings. Mitchell, for his part, was excited to find his Chinese colleagues from "the international writers' tribe" employing similar writing techniques and encountering the same confusions as he does.

He set the theme of "How to Build a Fictional House" as the topic to discuss with Su.

"If novels are fictional houses that writers build for readers to enter, I'm interested in the building materials of the house. My shopping list includes five materials - plot, structure, characters, style and themes," he explained.

"For me, characters are definitely the most important among the five building materials. If I have only one rule about writing novels, my rule is that you create a character that is very likeable for the readers, and then you make them worry what is going to happen to him."

"You can have a very clever structure or very exciting plot, but it's the characters that touch the hearts of readers. That's why you can have a very simple plot being successful if the characters are greatly written," he added.

This also explains why he prefers writing in the first person. All of his novels, with the exception of the latest historic novel "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet," are written in the first person.

"I tried to avoid writing in the third person as much as possible. Writing in the first person helps me really get into my characters and decide what to include and what to leave out in the stories," he added.

He wrote letters to himself from his characters so that "I can understand their minds and languages." He also found reading writers from other historical periods and dialects and writing down how they use language differently helpful to mastering various styles.

Mitchell gave a long list of favorite writers, including Kazuo Ishiguro, Jim Crace, Michel Faber, Haruki Murakami, Juni'ichiro Tanizaki, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Alice Munro, John Cheever, Italo Calvino and Ursula Le Guin, among "200 other writers, at least."

When researching "The Thousand Autumns of Jaco de Zoet" in the Netherlands, Mitchell was approached by a Dutch composer who asked him to collaborate on writing an opera.

Recently, he has been working on his second opera, this time a ghost story with a British composer.

"It is a ghost story set in a garden in an ambiguous time and space. I wrote it with the idea of a tour in mind, so we wrote it into a very movable stage," Mitchell said.

The opera will premiere in London next April.

The author recommends readers to read his books in reverse order. It is important for him that "my next novel is better than the last one" and he is afraid to ever reach the stage of being too famous that the editor stops editing.

"I'm glad I'm not at that stage yet and I make my editor swear that they will tell me the truth," he said. "And my wife, who doesn't care about my fame, is my secret weapon."

"She's my first reader. She doesn't give me details, but she gives me critical feedback, saying 'it's good' or 'you can do better'," he added.

"She's a busy, tired and stressed mother. So if she likes it, then I know it's working. It's the tired, stressed mothers who are more likely to buy books in the UK."

In order to attract these readers, and more importantly, in order to satisfy himself, Mitchell has become addicted to always posing new challenges for his next projects.

"There is a direct relation between originality of the book and the uniqueness and difficulties of challenges in writing it," he explained. "It's like escapology. The more original and the harder the escapology, the more likely it is to produce a unique book. There is no point writing something you can just easily write without sweating."

(Shi Xiaoguang contributed to this story)