The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Chapter IAbout the book

First published

2010

Main genre

Historical fiction

Length

480 pages

A young Dutch clerk arrives on Dejima, the artificial island in Nagasaki's harbour where Europeans may trade with Japan, and tries to stay honest in a place built on bribes. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet begins in the summer of 1799, in the middle of a trial. Jacob de Zoet, a clerk on a Dutch merchant ship, arrives midway through the ad hoc trial of Daniel Snitker, the acting chief of the trading post. He has been sent to audit accounts damaged by fraud and smuggling, and he hopes to make a fortune to pay the dowry of his betrothed, Anna, back in the Netherlands. On the island, a closed world run by the Dutch East India Company, he meets Orito Aibagawa, a Japanese midwife and the only woman among the students at the medical academy led by Dr. Marinus. Dejima is tiny, only two hundred paces along its outer curve, and the Dutch are confined to it, with the Japanese interpreters, officials and spies watching every exchange. Jacob is honest in a place where honesty is not the currency, and the novel follows what that costs him, and the people he comes to care about.

Chapter IIThe author and the making

The book began in 1994. David Mitchell was backpacking in western Japan on a teaching trip and, looking for a cheap lunch in Nagasaki, found the museum at Dejima and filled a notebook with details about the place. The novel took him four years in all, and he has said that a single sentence could take half a day to write and that it almost finished him off before he finished it off. Some of it rests on real history: the visit of HMS Phaeton to Dejima is real, and Jacob resembles Hendrik Doeff, who arrived in 1799, stayed 18 years and wrote a memoir of the island. Engelbert Kaempfer's Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed informs many details. Mitchell described Dejima as a place where the Dutch traded goods and materials but also ideas and knowledge about what was happening in the rest of the world, and likened its isolation to the way North Korea is closed off today. He also explained why he turned toward historical fiction: younger writers are drawn to novelty, but with age these messy, human, muddy scenes become much more interesting. It was his fifth novel, after Ghostwritten in 1999, number9dream in 2001, Cloud Atlas in 2004 and Black Swan Green in 2006. Sceptre published it in the UK on 13 May 2010 as a 480-page hardback.

Chapter IIIHow it was received

The novel was long-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, won the regional prize of the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for South Asia and Europe, and was shortlisted for the 2011 Walter Scott Prize. Time ranked it fourth among fiction in its best books of the year and The New York Times named it a Notable Book. Michael Schaub, for NPR, called it inventive and complex and said it might not be Mitchell's best novel, but it is closer than you would think. The London Review of Books was far less convinced. Matthew Reynolds found Dejima a novelty in Mitchell's work and praised scene-setting that is convincingly grubby and particular, but called the middle plot routine melodrama, even a mass-production Orientalist melodrama, said the telegraphic style becomes wearisome as the default mode, and judged the narrative structure disappointingly familiar. He also objected to how untroubling Mitchell's accounts of different cultures are. The disagreement is about whether the book's cultural contact is told with enough friction, and readers who prize the first and last sections often find the middle the weaker part.

Chapter IVWhy it matters

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet matters as the book in which Mitchell turned from the formal games of Cloud Atlas to a straight historical novel, and as a rare English-language fiction set on Dejima, the sole official conduit for European trade with Japan under the Tokugawa shoguns. Reynolds called the Dutch-Japanese contact a genuinely unique case study in almost egalitarian cultural collision, and the novel gives the case study a human face. It also shows Mitchell's gift for the lived-in scene, the smell and the paperwork of a trading post. Be ready for its reservations. Critics found the middle of the book melodramatic and the style at times wearisome, and some find its picture of cultures too smooth. At 480 pages it is a patient read, and readers who loved the structural fireworks of Cloud Atlas will find a much more conventional shape here. It suits readers who enjoy period detail, moral dilemmas and a closed setting, and it is a poor fit for those who want formal experiment or a fast plot. It stands alone and needs no earlier Mitchell novel.

Chapter VIf you liked this

• Shogun James ClavellA European arrives in feudal Japan and has to read an unfamiliar world
• Silence Shusaku EndoA serious novel of Europeans in closed Tokugawa Japan
• Cloud Atlas David MitchellMitchell's earlier book of historical voices, in a much more experimental form
• Wolf Hall Hilary MantelA historical novel of power, paperwork and a watchful central character