The multibyte or wide character error message is troubling to me and I don't have any direct advice to working around that.
I assume /dev/sdd1 and /dev/sdb1 are your metadata and data storage block devices? Do they contain any data?
Have you tried zeroing out the metadata volume (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdd1)? I had issues with when setting up dm-cache a while back.
In a nutshell I do the following (on Ubuntu 13.04 + Linux 3.10 release):
dmsetup create ssd-metadata --table '0 19370 linear /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_OCZ-AGILITY2_f2d200034-part6 0'
dmsetup create ssd-blocks --table '0 189008982 linear /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_OCZ-AGILITY2_f2d200034-part6 19370'
dmsetup create home-cached --table '0 1048576000 cache /dev/mapper/ssd-metadata /dev/mapper/ssd-blocks /dev/vg0/spindle 512 1 writeback default 0'
On a side note, I ran the 3.9.6 and a few earlier 3.9 kernels without issue on Ubuntu 12.11 and 13.04.
If all else fails, I have a working solution for my setup on my blog with more details, you might want to check out for a step by step tutorial.