Follow the author
David MitchellDavid Mitchell
Follow
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: Longlisted for the Booker Prize Paperback – 1 March 2011
by David Mitchell (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 4,333 ratings
Kindle$11.99Read with our free app
Audiobook 1 Credit Paperback$17.70
1 Used from $13.7517 New from $17.70
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010
In your hands is a place like no other: a tiny, man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki, for two hundred years the sole gateway between Japan and the West. Here, in the dying days of the 18th century, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his fortune. Instead he loses his heart.
Step onto the streets of Dejima and mingle with scheming traders, spies, interpreters, servants and concubines as two cultures converge. In a tale of integrity and corruption, passion and power, the key is control - of riches and minds, and over death itself.
Read less
Report incorrect product information.
Print length
576 pages
Language
English
Publisher
Sceptre
Publication date
1 March 2011
======
Product description
Review
Compared with almost everything being written now, it is vertiginously ambitious - and brilliant - The Times
Unquestionably a marvel - entirely original among contemporary British novels, revealing its author as, surely, the most impressive fictional mind of his generation - Observer
Arguably his finest . . . It will doubtless earn Mitchell his fourth Man Booker nomination and, if there's any justice, his first win. - Sunday Telegraph
However densely charted and richly sketched, this sumptuous imbroglio never drags . . . Mitchell flexes his prose virtuosity. More than before, those muscles do the heart's work. - Independent
Spectacularly accomplished and thrillingly suspenseful . . . a narrative of panoramic span. Mitchell fills his pages with a medley of accents, idioms and speech habits. Prodigiously researched, his book resurrects a place and period with riveting immediacy . . . it brims with rich, involving and affecting humanity - Sunday Times
That rare thing - a novel which actually deserves the accolade "tour de force" - Daily Telegraph Books of the Year
Moving, thoughtful and unexpectedly funny - Observer Books of the Year
Hugely enjoyable . . . the descriptions of Dejima and what life there must have been like are extraordinarily accurate - Literary Review
Review
Compared with almost everything being written now, it is vertiginously ambitious - and brilliant - The Times
Unquestionably a marvel - entirely original among contemporary British novels, revealing its author as, surely, the most impressive fictional mind of his generation - Observer
Arguably his finest . . . It will doubtless earn Mitchell his fourth Man Booker nomination and, if there's any justice, his first win. - Sunday Telegraph
However densely charted and richly sketched, this sumptuous imbroglio never drags . . . Mitchell flexes his prose virtuosity. More than before, those muscles do the heart's work. - Independent
Spectacularly accomplished and thrillingly suspenseful . . . a narrative of panoramic span. Mitchell fills his pages with a medley of accents, idioms and speech habits. Prodigiously researched, his book resurrects a place and period with riveting immediacy . . . it brims with rich, involving and affecting humanity - Sunday Times
That rare thing - a novel which actually deserves the accolade "tour de force" - Daily Telegraph Books of the Year
Moving, thoughtful and unexpectedly funny - Observer Books of the Year
Hugely enjoyable . . . the descriptions of Dejima and what life there must have been like are extraordinarily accurate - Literary Review
Read more
Product details
ASIN : 0340921587
Publisher : Sceptre; 1st edition (1 March 2011)
Language : English
Paperback : 576 pages
ISBN-10 : 9780340921586
ISBN-13 : 978-0340921586
Dimensions : 13 x 2.8 x 19.6 cmBest Sellers Rank: 43,927 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)3,218 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
5,744 in Literary Fiction (Books)
7,651 in Historical Fiction (Books)Customer Reviews:
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 4,333 ratings
About the author
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Follow
David Mitchell
Born in 1969, David Mitchell grew up in Worcestershire. After graduating from Kent University, he taught English in Japan, where he wrote his first novel, GHOSTWRITTEN. Published in 1999, it was awarded the Mail on Sunday John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, NUMBER9DREAM, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and in 2003, David Mitchell was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. His third novel, CLOUD ATLAS, was shortlisted for six awards including the Man Booker Prize, and adapted for film in 2012. It was followed by BLACK SWAN GREEN, shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year Award, and THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET, which was a No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller, and THE BONE CLOCKS which won the World Fantasy Best Novel Award. All three were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. David Mitchell’s seventh novel is SLADE HOUSE (Sceptre, 2015).
In 2013, THE REASON I JUMP: ONE BOY'S VOICE FROM THE SILENCE OF AUTISM by Naoki Higashida was published by Sceptre in a translation from the Japanese by David Mitchell and KA Yoshida and became a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. Its successor, FALL DOWN SEVEN TIMES, GET UP EIGHT: A YOUNG MAN’S VOICE FROM THE SILENCE OF AUTISM, was published in 2017, and was also a Sunday Times bestseller.
Read less
Top reviews
Top reviews from Australia
RinaL
5.0 out of 5 stars Absorbing and wide rangingReviewed in Australia on 11 August 2014
Verified Purchase
An absorbing and wide ranging novel, full of derring-do but also characters, situations and metaphors that invite investigation. The action takes place between 1799 and 1817, much of it on the (significantly) man-made island of Dejima near Nagasaki. The Dutch East India Company is the main tenant and the only company allowed to trade with Japan during a time of strict control to preserve Japanese culture and sovereignty. In the story the island is a sort of stage for human values set among the controlling politics and long traditions of Japan, the scientific discoveries and new philosophies of Europe, and the exacting requirements of survival in a commercial company. One of the main protagonists Jacob de Zoet is a clever young man with bright red hair, out to make his way in the company so he can afford to go home to Zeeland and marry the girl he loves. He meets Orito Aibagawa, the beautiful mid-wife with a facial blemish and a scientific mind, with whom he becomes fascinated but, for the most part, can admire only from afar. He forms a bond with Ogawa Uzaemon, the enlightened and well educated interpreter, keen to borrow a copy of The Wealth of Nations - who loves and will do anything for Orito. There is an evil Abbot and a caustic and difficult Dutch doctor, both of whom are players in Jacob's rite of passage and key moral points in the drama. While on the surface this is an historical novel with a linear plot, it does have a touch of "magic realism" in that historical events are shifted slightly in chronological time to lend the right symbolic balance and at least two characters and some of the scenarios would fit easily into a fairy tale - adding yet another layer to the meaning. Some sections of the novel are hard going, mostly because of the style of some of the dialogues (accents to indicate class and narrative interruptions) and there are perhaps a few too many minor characters, but on the whole it is a superbly written, rich and literary novel. I have continued to think about it weeks after reading it.
HelpfulReport
DressageDreamer
4.0 out of 5 stars FascinatingReviewed in Australia on 3 April 2021
Verified Purchase
A well written tale with twists and turns, and a suitably upstanding main character to like. Well worth reading as it travels in time to such an unknowable place.
HelpfulReport
Lis Faenza
5.0 out of 5 stars A Tour de ForceReviewed in Australia on 10 May 2016
Verified Purchase
My favourite Mitchell book so far! I love the themes that intertwine this with Cloud Atlas and the Bone Clocks. Jacob de Zoet is a protagonist to be proud of, rich, full, yearning, foolish and brave all at once. Imperial Shogun Japan is a magnificent backdrop for this suspenseful thriller, which reveals characters who thread their way through time and Mitchell's other narratives like silk. I will read this book again, probably before the year is out, as I long to immerse myself once more in the dying days of the Dutch East India Company and their last micro-empire in Japan.
HelpfulReport
Scott Ferguson
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant. David Mitchell is up there with Cormac McCarthy and Tim Winton in writing books that stir your emotions. Profound and beautiful and funny and Classic. I’ve almost caught up with everything he’s written, so will be hanging on the next book. A modern master I would give 6 stars if allowedReviewed in Australia on 14 May 2021
Verified Purchase
Read this and weep. Mitchell plants the idea that our end is not really our end, but a transition to another life.
HelpfulReport
Darklldo
3.0 out of 5 stars Far too slow..Reviewed in Australia on 18 November 2018
Verified Purchase
and with no likelihood of it speeding up to become something intense and fascinating. I bought this book full of the desire to read more about Japan and its history but instead found myself trapped on a small island just outside the gates of Japan where trade and crime moved hand in hand.
None of the characters were, in any way, interesting and what detail there was became taken up with why men used shaving cream, or how to induce a fart smelling burp. Did we really need to know?
This decided me that if that was the peak of what was to follow I may as well close the book now, and did.
I was sadly let down and won't try his books again.
HelpfulReport
Ross
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Story Convincing real life charactersReviewed in Australia on 18 February 2018
Verified Purchase
Excellent Story Convincing real life characters, well researched high drama and touching moments Shame Mitchell didn't write more like it
HelpfulReport
Wendy
5.0 out of 5 stars A fantastically engrossing insight to life in Nagasaki & the ...Reviewed in Australia on 25 November 2017
Verified Purchase
A fantastically engrossing insight to life in Nagasaki & the Dutch East India Company. I didn't want it to end.
HelpfulReport
Yvonne Tester
3.0 out of 5 stars Three StarsReviewed in Australia on 4 February 2016
Verified Purchase
Slow pace. Confusing characters.
HelpfulReport
See more reviews
Top reviews from other countries
Translate all reviews to English
furinkazan
4.0 out of 5 stars PoetischReviewed in Germany on 21 October 2023
Verified Purchase
Die Sprache ist sehr schön, das Ganze athmosphärisch dicht, das Thema historisch interessant. Der Plot nicht besonders spannend und etwas konstruiert. Etwas mehr Tempo und weniger Dialoge wären mir lieber gewesen. Ganz übel fand ich die Romanze. Notgeiler Jungmann sieht nach Monaten auf See endlich wieder eine Frau, die natürlich die Liebe seines Lebens ist. Warum habe ich nicht verstanden. Das ist wieder Männerquark ala: Sie war hübsch und hatte sone Hupen und Beine bis zum Boden, er wollte sie sofort nageln und ihm war klar, das war die große Liebe. Ich hoffe für den Autor in seinem Liebesleben ist etwas mehr los.
Report
Translate review to English
JR
4.0 out of 5 stars It's quite and intriguing tale with many charactures.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 October 2023
Verified Purchase
Beautiful observed, quite an involved read but overall I really enjoyed the book.
Report
Martin Zook
5.0 out of 5 stars A Most Wise TaleReviewed in the United States on 18 August 2010
Verified Purchase
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet works on multiple levels, as noted elsewhere here. My neighbor Roger Brunyate says that Mitchell writes small, medium, and large. I agree and think this can be even further defined as the individual characters, historical setting, and spiritual.
I think we can also view the book through Aristotilian lenses, where the action (a very important word in this book) is the most important element, the characters second, and the thought (given the action and characters what is possible going forward) follows.
I say action is important because in the Eastern philosophy of the awakened mind (Buddhism) action is translated as the Sanskrit karma and consists of three parts: 1) cause, 2) effect, 3) motivation. It is the third element that makes the action complete. So, the action of generosity is completed when the motivation is good - that is nothing is expected in return and there is no reluctance about the giving (think Jacob when he gifts the dictionary to Aibagawa and the subsequent repercussions).
A reviewer here who unjustly denigrated their perception quite rightly noted that the actions of the characters came from within themselves. And that's a large part of the multifaceted brilliance of this book.
Early on (p.115), Jacob is asked to define repercussions, and does so thusly: "a consequence; the result of an action. A repercussion..." And that's what this book is about: the repercussions of the characters' actions, and collectively (yes, there is collective karma) the actions of their peoples.
The characters don't act in a void. As Shiroyama notes in his final go match against the Abbot, it seems as if the two have been pieces or puppets controlled by other forces, a possibility raised throughout the book. Mitchell doesn't conclusively address the issue, but the book leaves the impression it could be the energy and momentum these two have developed over their lives that is (they suffer the repercussions of their own actions - karma); or Mitchell holds out the vague possibility of some unnamed force of the world (fate?).
The main action of the book is the the ends (repercussions) of the characters, especially the unity achieved between Jacob and Aibagawa. This is a special unity because he is a figure of wisdom (seeing the true nature of a phenomena by understanding the phenomena and how it is connected to other phenomena), as is Aibagawa. He is the masculine element, typically associated with the direct light of the sun (think about his hair) that dispels the darkness and illuminates. Masculine wisdom is intellectual and direct, such as when Jacob revealed the incriminating scroll directly to the magistrate, not through translators as is customary.
Feminine wisdom - more intuitive - is associated with the reflected light of the moon, which illuminates all in a softer light that does not dispel the darkness. So, in that regard it is often regarded as more complete. It's worth noting here, Aibagawa is the one who connects all the dots and sees the whole picture at the end. It is she who sees how the chain of cause/effect has made her path possible and the role suffering played in it.
This addresses, however briefly, the small and large of the book. On the medium level as Roger defined it, is the historical. Some readers here raised the issue of what they see as the inferior quality of Mitchell's historical recounting.
I think that can be better understood if one considers a highly likely influence on Mitchell: The Autumn of the Middle Ages, by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, which was republished in 1997. Briefly, its import is that it is a breakthrough approach to viewing new eras by defining them in an examination of the decaying previous era, exactly the approach Mitchell takes in his book. (This also strikes me as a very feminine approach as detailed above.)
So in that regard, Mitchell is examining the emergence of a new global era that conflates East & West.
Perhaps the thing that most impresses me about this book is how close it comes to expressing the unity of Western dual thinking (a system of thought based on paradoxical poles - masculine and feminine, for instance) with Eastern nondual thinking (masculine and feminine are so connected that there is no inherent difference). Experts no less than Carl Gustave Jung and the Dalai Lama have unanimously held forth that ultimately the two schools of thought diverge. But Mitchell has produced a text that at least makes me wonder.
Let me apologize for yammering on at such length. If some are interested in discussing this book further, I am greatly interested and I believe Amazon allows for such things.
Read less
7 people found this helpfulReport
C. E. Stevens
4.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing page turner that comes up a bit shortReviewed in the United States on 30 January 2013
Verified Purchase
(Caution: some spoilers ahead)
I thought the first 200 or so pages of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet were absolutely brilliant: Mitchell succeeded precisely by dismissing any suspicions or expectations that his story would be a reheated version of the novel that--for better or for worse--has become the archetype of historical fiction written about Japan by non-Japanese: Shogun. Where Shogun is expansive, Thousand Autumns starts off delightfully claustrophobic; whereas Shogun's protagonist quickly becomes a Japanophile, gains entry into the inaccessible and the exotic, and sets off on a series of adventures, Thousand Autumns' protagonist is--although intelligent and likable--clearly out of his element, lacking in power amongst his own people let alone a foreign race, and more observer than participant. By creating a story about Dejima (rather than "Japan" per se) that is both as inward-looking and in-between worlds as that tiny island, Mitchell quickly finds his own voice and creates a unique story very different than Shogun and focused on universal and timeless issues like race, power, and faith. Looking back, I found the beating of Sjako--the reasons for it, the reactions to it--in many ways to be among the most impactful and passionate sections of the entire book: full of deeper meaning, demanding of the reader's introspection, and--brilliantly, and unconventionally for this genre--having completely nothing to do with "Japan".
Then, abruptly, Mitchell abandons his sympathetic protagonist and the nuanced confines of Dejima (the island becomes a character in its own right) for a good 200 pages to focus on the Orito-in-captivity story. If the first part of the novel was an interesting expansion of The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing from Cloud Atlas, the second part was an oddly flat retelling of An Orison of Sonmi-451 from the same tale, without the nuance or deeper meaning. I found myself bewildered by Enomoto and the infanticide plot line ... it touched upon some of the recurring motifs of faith, power, and oppression but not in a convincing or compelling manner. Enomoto feels like a cardboard cutout villain, the "good guys" like Orito and Ogawa are oddly impotent and less interesting as main protagonists compared to the supporting roles they previously held, and the whole strange storyline seemed to drag on unnecessarily long. Moreover, despite being set in "normal" Japan with a cast of Japanese characters, the whole part felt jarringly un-Japanese. The setting could have been a monastery in Europe, the characters talked, acted, and thought distinctly in a European fashion despite clumsy attempts to "orientalize" things. Creating a believable world and realistic characters doing reasonable things in it is a big challenge with historical fiction, and Mitchell is usually spot-on in this regard; in this case, it just did not come together or ring true.
I was happy to get back to de Zoet in the last third of the novel, but this new de Zoet felt more like someone out of Clavell's tale: heroic, powerful, master of Japanese language and custom. Mitchell wrapped up loose ends fairly well and adopts a somber tone of melancholia suitable for the final plot twists and turns ... but at the end of the journey, he still leaves the reader feeling a bit unfulfilled.
Most of my comments about the book have been fairly negative. Yet, it was a page-turner; even when I could see where Mitchell was going, I still enjoyed being taken along for the ride. de Zoet was, overall, an interesting and thoughtful protagonist. Yet, it just seemed fairly predictable and conventional in the end--it was like eating a meal that is good enough, but you keep waiting for that extra little something to make it special and memorable. Perhaps Cloud Atlas just raised my expectations too high--honestly, if I didn't know better, I'd have thought Thousand Autumns was his earlier work, not Cloud Atlas. After all, in the latter, Mitchell essentially weaves together *six* historical fiction novels (some of the "history" just happens to be in the future). In comparison, this just feels a bit less ambitious and lacking in its ability to live up to its potential: Mitchell had a chance to transform the genre; instead he seems to just conform to it. Cloud Atlas grabbed my heart and stimulated my brain; Thousand Autumns kept me more or less entertained, but the fact that I did not end up enjoying it as much as I truly hoped I would left me feeling a little betrayed and disappointed. I debated between three and four stars, but decided to round up in the end--not a bad novel by any means, but perhaps a victim of my lofty expectations.
Read more
9 people found this helpfulReport
rainypayload
5.0 out of 5 stars Great bookReviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 August 2023
Verified Purchase
Sounds stuffy but the story of Dutch traders in Japan surprises at every turn - the book falls into very distinct parts with very different tones and for a good part of the book ‘our hero’ isn’t even in it - from corruption and intrigue to forbidden love and betrayal, sacrifice and magic, this book is truly unique I have genuinely nothing to compare it to - if you are looking for a happy ever after you are not going to get it but this book will stay with you and make you Google things about Japan and the activities of the Dutch and British trading fleets (I know that sounds stuffy but it’s not it’s more pirates of the Caribbean at times) - one of those books I can’t imagine how someone could write with such authority and imagination, truly impressive piece of work.
7 people found this helpfulReport
====
====
Jump to ratings and reviews
Want to read
Buy on Kobo
Rate this book
Edit my activity
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
David Mitchell
4.02
63,482 ratings6,621 reviews
The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland.
But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings. As one cynical colleague asks, “Who ain’t a gambler in the glorious Orient, with his very life?”
A magnificent mix of luminous writing, prodigious research, and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the most impressive achievement of its eminent author.
Genres
Fiction
Historical Fiction
Japan
Historical
Literary Fiction
Asia
Novels
...more
479 pages, Hardcover
First published May 13, 2010
Book details & editions
3,134 people are currently reading
50.8k people want to read
About the author
Profile Image for David Mitchell.
David Mitchell
103 books14k followers
Follow
David Mitchell was born in Southport, Merseyside, in England, raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, and educated at the University of Kent, studying for a degree in English and American Literature followed by an M.A. in Comparative Literature. He lived for a year in Sicily, then moved to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students for eight years, before returning to England. After another stint in Japan, he currently lives in Ireland with his wife Keiko and their two children. In an essay for Random House, Mitchell wrote: "I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but until I came to Japan to live in 1994 I was too easily distracted to do much about it. I would probably have become a writer wherever I lived, but would I have become the same writer if I'd spent the last 6 years in London, or Cape Town, or Moose Jaw, on an oil rig or in the circus? This is my answer to myself." Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), moves around the globe, from Okinawa to Mongolia to pre-Millennial New York City, as nine narrators tell stories that interlock and intersect. The novel won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for best work of British literature written by an author under 35) and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His two subsequent novels, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2003, he was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. In 2007, Mitchell was listed among Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World. Mitchell's American editor at Random House is novelist David Ebershoff.
Readers also enjoyed
Items 1 to 4 of 20
Book Cover
Проблема трьох тіл
Лю Цисінь
4.48
94
Book Cover
Romeo
Elise Title
3.68
555
Book Cover
Метелики на шпильках. Б’є восьма. Повнолітні діти
Iryna Vilde
4.54
191
Book Cover
L'Incroyable Histoire du sexe - livre 2 de l'Afrique à l'Asie
Philippe Brenot
4.19
72
All similar books
Ratings & Reviews
My Review
Profile Image for Sejin.
Sejin
3 reviews
Want to read.
Rate this book
Write a Review
Friends & Following
No one you know has read this book. Recommend it to a friend!
Community Reviews
4.02
63,482 ratings6,621 reviews
5 stars
23,097 (36%)
4 stars
24,964 (39%)
3 stars
10,514 (16%)
2 stars
3,291 (5%)
1 star
1,616 (2%)
Search review text
Search review text
Filters
Displaying 1 - 10 of 6,621 reviews
Profile Image for Stephen King.
Stephen King
Author
2,565 books
831k followers
Follow
Read
February 1, 2014
In this historical novel, an unassuming Dutch bookkeeper named Jacob de Zoet falls in love with a beautiful midwife in 18th-century Japan. When Miss Aiba-gawa is spirited away to a mountain monastery, Jacob finds the heroism in his soul. Here is a bygone secret world full of charm and horror. Mitchell is best known for Cloud Atlas, which was a literary stunt in this correspondent’s opinion. The Thousand Autumns is far better.
488 likes
Like
Comment
Profile Image for Ken.
Ken
Author
3 books
988 followers
Follow
September 23, 2021
Remember Dr. Seuss's words, children: "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" In the case of wunderkind writer David Mitchell's THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET, you'll set your time machine dial for 1799 and a makeshift Dutch port called Dejima on the shores of Nagasaki, Japan.
But let's take it down another level. You'll start at the port and live with old salts that'll make the Pirates of the Caribbean look like so many Lord Fauntleroys. You'll visit the homes of the secretive Japanese magistrates. You'll do some time in Dr. Marinus's "academy," witnessing some bone-chilling turn of THAT century operations (removal of a kidney stone, for instance, in full metal graphics). You'll go up into the mountains past Nagasaki, up to a castle where Japanese women are held in captivity but told they are "nuns" worshiping an obscure goddess. Over the river and through the woods you'll go in an exciting mission with samurais bent on rescuing one very special captive in this castle. And you'll even hit the low seas (off Dejima) and join British Captain Penhaligon as he wrestles with his conscience and his wits, trying to decide whether to attack the Dutch and Japanese or negotiate with them. Nautical chess games, anyone?
David Mitchell can flat-out write. Among contemporary writers, he reigns supreme (I would say in my book, but in HIS books, actually) for his ability to turn poetry into words and to make images dance in startling ways. This is a writer's writer with imagination and skill. And what's best is how he's constantly challenging himself as well. Here we have historical fiction in one of the most unusual of settings, yet you'll feel you're there and that you actually have an understanding of the mysterious land of the shoguns as well as the nefarious intrigues of the European traders. As you'd expect from Mitchell, the allusions are rich and varied, too. Through characters such as Dr. Marinus, the surgeon/musician/man of science as well as the arts with the Dutch, you'll hear references to the Greeks, the Romans, the ancient Arabs, the Bible, mythology, philosophers, scientists, and whatnot. An irascible and complex man, Marinus was one of my favorites, though his role was rather minor.
Bigger roles go, of course, to Jacob and the disfigured Japanese midwife he falls in love with, Orito Aibagawa. Jacob De Zoet, a practical and religious man, is honest to a fault. Among the Dutch lowlifes, he is both gasoline and match, in other words, and his zealous opposition to embezzling and skimming profits and black marketing make him many enemies. Orito has her own problems. A student of Dr. Marinus's, she attracts unwanted attention from the Japanese nobles (some "noble" and others vicious) when she dallies with the pale-skinned, auburn-haired Jacob. When she disappears, the novel takes off to some of the more exotic locales mentioned early in this review.
Some readers may struggle with the number of Japanese names and characters, especially at the "nunnery," but Mitchell at least is studious in his characterization and the special quirks he bestows to his creations. At times Mitchell can overwrite, too, when he should move on, but those instances are neither frequent nor extended. The book's best scenes come at the end when the added dimension of a British frigate is provided. The match of wits between Capt. Penhaligon and De Zoet when Dejima is bottled up by the man-of-war is a joy to read. Mitchell is at his best when dealing with the psychological and the power of decisions made in moments of crisis to alter history.
If you've had your fill of beach reads this summer, THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET is your antidote. It's serious contemporary literature by one of our more gifted scribes. It's a grown-up's book that contains not only incredible description but a sound plot. And no, it won't baby you with constant, hold-on-to-your-seat action, but you can handle that and you can appreciate a novel for its construction and its grander designs as well, right?
So why not give it a places-you'll-go?
contemporary
finished-in-2010
238 likes
Like
Comment
Profile Image for Ken-ichi.
Ken-ichi
598 reviews
567 followers
Follow
June 2, 2010
I've spent a week reading this very fine novel and a weekend attempting to unpack it, and I have little doubt I'll spend a good few years thinking about it from time to time. If one measure of a novel is its ability to simultaneously inspire and confound engagement, then Mitchell has once again turned it up to 11.
Most of the reviews I've been reading have remarked that this is Mitchell's most formally conventional novel (linear, third-person narrative), and that his often scintillating prose has been burnished to a more muted lustre, and for the most part these are accurate. There's less showmanship here, without any reduction in finesse. But in all Mitchell's novels, messages hide within the virtuosity, and this book's lack of embellishment brings them a little closer to the surface. We are tantalized with recurrent themes, unexplained symbols, ties between distant story lines (indeed, between entire novels!), and I've been having a hell of a time trying to reconstruct it all into some kind of meaning.
The reviews that have helped bring some coherence to my thoughts, though, are those by the Irish Times and the Times of London, both of which point out the importance of bridging divides between people, cultures, worlds. Dejima is a bridge between Europe and Japan. Its denizens are interpreters, tradesmen, and scientists, all disciplines that form bridges between people (language, goods, knowledge). Characters constantly bridge the gap between each other and between them and the reader by recounting their backstories in Scooby-Doo-esque wavy-screened flashbacks. Jacob and Uzaemon are united by books, and later by Orito. Jacob and Orito by love, letters, and language. Marinus and his Japanese colleagues by medicine and botany.
Dejima, like other frontiers, is also a crucible for morality, and we are constantly reminded of what can befall those who fail to bridge divides and continue to see other people and cultures as entirely alien. Corruption is rampant, as well as infidelity. The Dutch and the Japanese habitually try to cheat each other, just as they play and betray their own countrymen. Slavery and subjugation are implicitly and explicitly addressed again and again (like in Cloud Atlas).
It was interesting to me that there were very clear-cut Good Guys and Bad Guys. The Good Guys (de Zoet, Orito, Marinus, Uzaemon) are all truth-seekers of sorts. Jacob crunches numbers and uncovers corruption. Orito and Marinus are scientists. Uzaemon studies the true meaning of words. They all also have internal, non-relativistic moral codes that burn just as brightly on foreign soil as at home, and allow them to recognize kindred fires abroad. Jacob standing on the watch tower, or Marinus decrying the beating of a slave. Orito choosing to save others despite her imprisonment, and Uzaemon abandoning his steady, obedient life to destroy the temple.
The Bad Guys (Enomoto, Vorstenbosch, Capt. Lacy, Fischer) are universally self-interested, and view others as stepping stones, chattel, or even food. Enomoto is a bit of a mystery to me, though. He's a mustache-twirling, finger-tenting immortal super villain who has magic powers and eats babies. In a thoroughly researched, realistic historical novel, he kind of stands out. I suspect that aside from entertainment, his presence and exit are actually meant to demonstrate what evil is *not*. He's the only bad guy who gets his comeuppance, as if the only evils that can be truly vanquished are the imaginary ones. As Grote says, "'Tain't good intentions what paves the road to hell: it's self-justifyin's" (p. 104), and as Enomoto himself says, "Evil, evil evil. You always wield that word as if it were a sword and not a vapid conceit" (p. 309). Evil is not discrete or separate, nor can it be nicely excised. All the more human transgressors survive, even prosper.
Anyway, those are the things that seem to make sense to me about this novel.
Here are a few things that don't:
What the hell was up with the constant interruption of quotes?! For example:
'Chief van Cleef,' Fischer calls after him, 'and I shall discuss your insolence!'
'It's a long way,' Ivo Oost smokes in a doorway, 'down to the bottom...'
'It is my signature,' Fischer shouts after him, 'that authorizes your wages!' (p. 166)
The majority of quotes are written this way. In an unknown author, I might attribute this to a weird lexical tick, but Mitchell is a careful, meticulous writer capable of adopting many different voices and styles, so I think this has to be intentional. But what does it mean? I'm guessing the form has some relation to Japanese literature or poetry, but I don't know enough to make a connection.
Mitchell also repeatedly employs this weird interleaving of interior and exterior monologue. An example from the Phoebus, as Cpt. Penhaligon listens to a sermon:
'"And when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared..."'
The common run of chaplains is either too meek for so unruly a flock...
'"...and no small tempest lay on us, all hope that we should be saved..."'
...or else, so zealous that the sailors ignore, scorn or vilify them.
'"...was then taken away. But after long abstinence Paul stood forth...'"
Chaplain Wily, an oysterman's son from Whistable, is a welcome exception.
(p. 328)
These passages are almost unreadable. Perhaps they are there both to contrast truth as thought and truth as communicated (the bridge), and to demonstrate how utterly discordant the two can be.
Animals: a moth witnesses birth at the start, and a butterfly witnesses death at the finish. Orito speaks to cats and rats in moments of drug-induced madness, and William Pitt the monkey bears witness to the tribulations on Dejima. Nature does not play an overt role in this book (or in any Mitchell novel?), but natural elements seem be deliberately included. Simply mneomnic rigging, or is there more explicit allegory at play?
And finally, my notes.
puerperal (adj): adj form of puerpera, a woman who has just given birth. (p. 8)
yakumoso (n): a bit of searching of suggests this is some member of the genus Leonurus, maybe Leonurus japonicus . Apparently it's commonly used in Asian folk medicine, just as the related motherwort is used in European folk medicine. As with so many folk remedies, it seems to treat just about everything, though there apparently are some papers about antimicrobial properties.
farrago (n): hodgepodge, mixture. (p. 11)
carrack (n): a kind of merchant ship. (p. 15)
"The pain is prismatic." (p. 45) I kind of hate it when authors employ literally floral language when describing pain (delicate pain, pain blossoming, etc). I like "prismatic."
provedore (n): a purveyor or provider? How do they relate to stevedores? Prove gives the hard tack to Steve and Steve loads it onto the boat? Why isn't anyone named "Prove"? Why?! (p. 56)
"Deflate your testicles comme à la mode: via the village pimp or Sin of Onan." (p. 58). Sadly, it doesn't take much to make me laugh. As usual, though, the Bible is funnier: "And the thing which he did displeased the LORD: wherefore he slew him also" (Genesis 38:10). Old Testament God held no truck with half-assed punishment like mere blindness!
glister (n): alternate spelling of "clyster," which is an archaic term for an enema (had to rely on Wikipedia for the alternate orthography, but "clyster" is in my abbreviated OED). This scene is both horrid and hilarious. I love Dr. Marinus. (p. 66)
dithyrambic (adj): a dithyramb was a form a Greek song and dance involving a large group of men and boys dancing in a circle. Apparently it had a unique meter, but not sure what it was. (p. 69)
chandler (n): candle-maker. (p. 100)
splenetic (adj): pertaining to the spleen, irritable. (p. 109)
langer (n): apparently an all-purpose disparagement in County Cork, Ireland. Wikipedia and this page have interesting perspectives on the history of the word (as does this performance of The Langer Song!). If the east Indian simian etymology is correct, though, Con Twomey would have been a bit ahead of his time in speaking it, despite being a Corkman. (p. 111)
bourse (n): an exchange or market. (p. 114)
monorchid (n): a man with only one testicle. Let me take a moment to assure you that that the somewhat juvenile selection of words here reflects the rather puerile condition of my own predilections and not the overall tenor of the novel. The word "orchid" apparently derives from the Greek word órkhis, meaning "testicle." I always chuckled when I read about the "scrotum-like" flowers of the Pink lady's slipper (Cypripedium acaule). Now I realize I should have been chuckling a lot more! (p. 118)
"Act, implores the Ghost of Future Regret. I shan't give you another chance." (p. 123)
manumission (n): manumit means "to free from slavery" (the etymology seems to be something like "emit from one's hand"). This passage sets off a debate about slavery. (p. 129)
"'So it is the sulphur of Jean Calvin,' says the Irishman, in English, 'making war on my nostrils.'" Jean Calvin as in the eponymous progenitor of Calvinist Christian doctrine, to which the Dutch de Zoet would probably subscribe. That went right over my head. (p. 151)
moxibustion (n): a form of East-Asian medicine involving mugwort, which is apparently dried and burned, or actually burned into the skin. (p. 174)
Maria and Iesu-sama: I had no idea there were all these Christians in Japan! Spanish and Portuguese Jesuits brought Christianity to Japan in the 16th century and apparently it was so popular the Shogunate saw it as the preliminary incursion of European imperialism, and made moves to snuff it (including killing lots of people and instituting the ritual of fumi-e), resulting in Japan's legendary seclusionist policy that lasted until the Perry Expedition in the 19th century. I know so, so little about history. Sigh. (p. 178)
febrifuge (n): drug to reduce fever, also known as an antipyretic. (p. 193)
Van Diemen's Land (pn): another name for Tasmania. The indigenous Palawa went extinct after encountering Europeans. (p. 199)
"Men of commerce, sir [...:] for the most part, had their consciences cut out at birth. Better an honest drowning than slow death by hypocrisy, law or debt." Ah, a man after my own heart (p. 332)
"Ibani qui poterant [...:] qui non potuere cadebant." I think there's a typo and it should be Ibant qui poterant, qui non potuere cadebant, which means "Those who could have gone, those who could not have fallen," which seems appropriate. I guess Marinus is referring to this pastel by Dutch painter Cornelis Troost, but the painting seems to depict drunken party-goers trying to head home. A joke, I guess. Where in Hell does Mitchell get this stuff. (p. 366)
podagra (n): synonym for gout (p. 375)
bagnio (n): literally a bath house, though in this sense probably whore house. (p. 381)
ingravescent (adj): gradually worsening. I like how even the Cpt. objects to the arcane language. Not that I'm objecting. I'm doing the opposite. (p. 407)
"Reverse our reverses" Penhaligon, Shiroyama, and Marinus all employ this phrase. To what end, Mitchell?! (p. 429)
Regarding the V-sign and the Battle of Agincourt: as I dimly recalled while reading this passage, the French supposedly threatened to cut off the first two fingers of English longbowmen, and the English thus used those same fingers to taunt the vanquished French. However, Wikipedia claims the story is apocryphal, and that the gesture's first recorded use dates to the early 20th century. (p. 430)
Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, Auri sacra fames. Apparently from The Aeneid, this translation has it as, "Cursed lust of gold, to what dost thou not force the heart of man?" (p. 431)
japan
snoot
189 likes
Like
Comment
Profile Image for Cecily.
Cecily
1,150 reviews
4,230 followers
Follow
November 2, 2015
A shooting star lives and dies in an instant.
I first read this when it was published in paperback, just because it was by Mitchell. I admired the craft of the writing, but overall, I did not enjoy it as much as I hoped: I’m not a huge fan of historical fiction, and this seemed a very straightforward narrative in comparison with three of his four preceding books.
Now in 2014, after reading The Bone Clocks, I discover that is the second in the Marinus trilogy and this was the first. Almost immediately, I returned to this, and oh how utterly different and more complex it turns out to be. So much was hiding in plain sight. This book really demonstrates the enormous canvass of the uber-book that Mitchell is planning years ahead, over many volumes, some more closely connected than others.
An autumn breeze drags its invisible robes around the fine room.
Note: It’s hard to manage all my interconnected reviews of Mitchell’s books, but they are all here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
What sort of novel is this?
This is a single, largely chronological, story, told in three main sections.
A gibbous moon is grubby. Stars are bubbles trapped in ice.
It is a work of exhaustively researched historical fiction, set in the Dutch concession of Dejima in Japan (a closed, artificial island, within a nation of islands closed to the world), at the crossover of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dejima was Japan’s only window on the rest of the world and Europe’s only window on Japan. Windows are a leitmotif throughout, and Land of A Thousand Autumns is one of the names Japan was known by.
It’s also very much the story of two men who love the same, apparently unattainable, woman.
Dawn breathes muddy greens and ember reds through grey woods.
There’s an escape attempt, a rescue mission, secret messages, and a battle, but still pretty conventional.
More quirkily, there is a constant smattering of exquisite once-sentence images, almost like haiku. (I’ve sprinkled some in this review, as you’ve probably noticed.)
Marigolds in the vase are the precise shade of summer, remembered.
There are useful historical notes and a list of characters at the back.
But it is also a book with a hidden understory: the cover, foreword and afterword do not even hint at any of the… less factual aspects that link it to The Bone Clocks. So it is two books in one – depending whether you know more about Marinus when you read this.
Wisteria in bloom foams over a crumbling wall.
Whereas The Bone Clocks overtly pre-empts possible criticism and highlights deus ex machina moments, this is subtler, except once: “You’d think these coincidences’d not happen, not off the stage, not in life”, but there aren’t that many of them here.
Plot
The notes of luminous sonatas hang like grapes from the stave.
On a first reading, the plot was at the forefront; rereading after The Bone Clocks, the plot is more of a framework for the ideas within. Nevertheless:
It opens with a life and death scene: the delivery of the local Magistrate’s son. However, most of the first section covers the arrival of young, shrewd, clever, honourable clerk, Jacob de Zoet, whose father and uncle were pastors. He is to investigate anomalies in the company accounts.
A doe cries for her yearling, slaughtered.
We glimpse this beguiling and unfamiliar world, with its complex language (foreigners weren’t allowed to learn it) and rigid ritual, through his eyes. There’s plenty of wheeling and dealing and politics, within the Dutch community and between them and the Japanese – above and below board in both cases. Business isn’t what it was, which increases tension and the Dutch desire for more copper. In addition, Jacob falls for a Japanese midwife, Orito, who has a burn scar on her face and is a student of Dutch doctor Marinus.
The second section concerns a secretive and increasingly sinister mountain shrine, run by the powerful Abbot Enomoto, purportedly to bring fertility to the surrounding area. Monks and nuns are kept apart, mostly, and a new nun is sent, effectively sold by her step-mother to cover her dead father’s debts. This section relates most closely to The Bone Clocks, but also has echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and Brave New World, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....
Glass panes melt the moonlight; paper panes filer it, to chalk dust.
The third section has a single British warship, to “plunder the Dutch and seduce the Japanese" now that the Dutch parent company is bankrupt. Lots of twists (it’s hard to know who is on which side and what their intentions really are), compounded by a captain troubled by gout and, especially, side-effects of its treatment.
There are two short sections at the end, each set a few years later, tidying up Jacob’s life story. He achieves a degree of immortality though being painted; The artist “wondered at his air of melancholy distance, but exorcised the ghost of absence from the finished painting.”
Crows smear rumours across the melted, sticky sky.
Themes
All Mitchell’s favourite themes are covered with a light touch: slavery and other abuses of power are at the core, but also islands and rescue; souls, life, death, mortality and immortality; music (Marinus is a skilful pianist); bridges from one place or state to another, going full circle.
This last is illustrated when Jacob encourages a ladybird to pass from one hand to the other and back again, “The ladybird believes… she is on a momentous journey, but she is going nowhere.”
The first is addressed by Marinus, speaking out against slavery, "In the animal kingdom... the vanquished are eaten", which echoes a more chilling line in Cloud Atlas, “‘The weak are meat, the strong do eat.’… One fine day, a purely predatory world SHALL consume itself.” Others see the world differently, “Power is a man’s means… of composing the future.”
Fallen red leaves drift over a smeared sun held in dark water.
There is also a wonderful passage where a slave ponders the meaning of his state: “Slaves do not own. Slaves are owned.” This includes a spoon carved from a bone, for himself. “He fathered his children, yes. But to his master they are not ‘his’… My true name, my memories are things I own.” Later, “The word ‘my’ brings pleasure. The word ‘my’ brings pain.”
Connections with other Mitchell works
• Marinus is a significant character in this, and in The Bone Clocks. With echoes of all the comets in Cloud Atlas, he is described as entering “like a limping, grey-haired comet”. A shooting star is also mentioned as a throwaway line (listed in Quotes).
• There is passing mention of a “beautiful sunken garden”, tying in with the opera, The Sunken Garden, for which Mitchell wrote the libretto.
• The captain of the British ship, Phoebus, is Penhaligon, presumably an ancestor of Jonny Penhaligon in The Bone Clocks.
• Con Twomey reveals his real name is Fiacre Muntervary, presumably an ancestor of Mo Muntervary in Ghostwritten, Number9dream and The Bone Clocks.
• Arie Grote is pally with Jacob, and in The Bone Clocks, Marinus remembers him fondly.
A feathery fish hovers in the current; a bright berry floats by.
Secrets in plain sight
There are many comments from two characters in the book that are taken as metaphors or hyperbole by those they’re speaking to and by many readers. However, in Mitchell’s world, they are true.
Arising from The Bone Clocks: There are two definite atemporals: Marinus is a benevolent and musical medic who has lived through many lives, without desire or control on his part, whereas Abbot Enomoto is a power-hungry would-be immortal, actively seeking the lives of infants to defer death. However, in Orito’s eyes, Marinus achieves immortality in a more conventional way, as “a great teacher” who attains it in his students.
Lethargic waves die on the other side of the Sea Wall.
• Marinus says that his “sentence in this lifetime” only began when he recovered from a fever aged six. Horologists typically find themselves in a new body of a child around that age.
• Marinus says “my heart is the East’s, in this lifetime.” When Joseph asks if he’s afraid to die so far from home, he replies, “One has to die somewhere”.
• More explicitly, Marinus says “I am indestructible… I’ll wake up tomorrow – after a few months – and start all over again.” When he’s actually dying, he “joked that he was a grass-snake, shedding one skin.”
• Marinus is an awed champion of scientific progress and suggests he’ll be around to see what happens in the next hundred years.
• Marinus says he was taught something “by an unschooled old woman, many lifetimes ago”.
• An African slave also realises what Marinus is, “His skin is a White man’s, but through his eyes you can see his soul is not a White man’s soul. His soul is much older… A kwaio is an ancestor who does not stay on the island of ancestors. A kwaio returns and returns and returns, each time in a new child.”
• Abbot Enomoto tells Jacob he used to speak Spanish, though Jacob points out it’s two hundred years since the Spanish were in Japan.
• When Orito sees Enomoto after a gap of a few months, he “looked a full decade younger than she remembers.”
• Rather like a James Bond baddie, Enomoto fills in rather too many gaps when he has a knowing captive, ”I am more than six hundred years old. You shall die, in minutes”, and “Down the ages many hundreds… have all vowed to drag me down to Hell. Yet, as you see, I am still here.”
• Enomoto says “Mount Shiranui rejuvenates me” (it’s where the shrine is) and even “I cannot die”.
On a round rock, an immobile heron waits for fish.
Language, translation and stories
“A joke is a secret language… inside words.”
A gardener rakes the white stones by the bronze pond.
The problematic politics of trading is compounded by complex Japanese etiquette and ritual, but also the difficulties of translation, as is cleverly demonstrated. “Interpreters often have to provide both the answer and the tools to understand it”, but even so, there are words in Dutch and Japanese that have no easy translation into the other, giving scope for misunderstanding, whether accidental, or, sometimes, deliberate, and even then it may be for politeness, to deceive, or to insult.
All literature involves translation to some extent: from author’s mind to reader’s interpretation. That is even more so with a book like this, where little can be taken at face value.
Dark clouds clot and the dusk is silted with insects and bats.
Mitchell writes beautiful lines, but he is fundamentally a storyteller, and we all need stories: “It is stories… that make life… tolerable”, which prompts Orito to picture “the human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory and narrative into an entity shoes common name is Self.” Myth matters, too, but “The truth of a myth… is not its words but its patterns.”
Spirituality, especially persimmons
This is not my domain, and others have covered it far better than I can. In particular, Calico: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The darkness opposite stirs and quickens into the form of a cat.
Nevertheless, it’s plain that Mitchell continues his interest in Eastern beliefs, without ever preaching, although Marinus explicitly discusses migration of souls and karma with Jacob. The persimmon is more dominant in this book.
The cover of my copy has a Japanese woman holding out a persimmon, and in the book Orito gives one to Jacob, which he finds very sensual and she later dreams about. One of the Hidden Christians has a muddled theology that includes “Adam and Ewa who stole… [the] sacred persimmon”. And one of the haiku-like lines features one (and it’s actually 5-7-5), “A tiny girl skips like a skinny frog around a persimmon tree”.
The persimmon has so many echoes of other fruit: the apple in Eden (and also The Bone Clocks) and Persephone being trapped in the underworld because she ate some pomegranate seeds, to name but two.
Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch.
Then there’s Orito, the midwife: bringing new life into the world, but also wielding the power of death by some of the choices she makes.
Quotes
• “Ink… you most fecund of liquids.”
• “An ink brush… is a skeleton key for a prisoner’s mind.”
• “Nagasaki itself… looks oozed from between the verdant mountains’ splayed toes.”
• “The oarsmen propelled… by ‘sweeping’ their oars in the manner of a water-snake, in time to a breathy shanty.”
• “Arie Grote had a grin full of holes and a hat made of shark-hide.”
• “Immortality comes at a steep price.”
• “Power has an unpleasant taste.”
• “Dust thickens the air, corroding the sun.”
• In an earthquake, “Glass panes shatter into false diamonds, timber cracks like bones.”
• “Small fire-boats float on sea to guide souls home.” Jacob is stunned the Japanese “believe souls migrate in such a manner.”
• “A bat… chased by its own furry turbulence.”
• “The soul is a verb… not a noun.”
• “A reluctant window in the Deputy’s House is opened.”
• “The percussion of dripping water.”
• “The river below is a drunk, charging boulders and barging banks.”
• “Darkens uncoils and slides around the edges of Orito’s vision.”
• “Winter woods are creaking, knitted and knotted. Dead leaves lie in deep drifts. Needle-tips of birdsong stitch and thread the thicket’s many layers.”
• “The night sky is an indecipherable manuscript.”
• A “tray descending the ladder of servitude” to be refilled.
• “Sleep kisses his eyelids. The dreamlight is dappled.”
• “A house on the hill spews oily smoke in the wet and falling air.”
• “Insects encrust the cabin’s window, drawn by the bright lamp.”
• “A pigeon trills on the high window ledge.”
• “Creation’s light is pure on the papered window.”
• “A black dog wails on an outcrop.”
• “The moon-grey cat inspects the fish indifferently,”
• “The rain’s innumerable hoofs clatter on the streets and roofs.”
• “In the clear water a shoal of silver fish changes direction.”
• “Kawasemi’s kitten skitters after a dragonfly across the polished veranda.”
• “A maple leaf, fiery and fingered, is blown to the Magistrate’s side.”
• “A cockchaffer twitches its twin whiskers in the shadow of his inkwell.”
• “An invisible woodpecker works in short bursts on a nearby
• “Warblers call and query, higher up the hidden mountain."
Original Review from 2011
A good, and exhaustively researched historical novel, but I didn't enjoy it as much as Mitchell's previous books, despite a life-and-death opening. Indeed, life and death is a continuing theme, both of individuals (a major character is a midwife) and of culture and empire. I was expecting greater variety from Mitchell. It turns out my mistake was to view this as a standalone novel, when actually, it the precursor to The Bone Clocks (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).
And Mitchell plans a trilogy (a slightly odd concept, given how connected all his novels are to each other).
PLOT
Jacob de Zoet is an ambitious and upstanding young clerk. In 1799, he arrives in Dejima, the Dutch concession in Japan, and the only port which traded with the rest of the world. He has five years to prove himself an acceptable son-in-law and is honourable, empathetic, clever and keen to learn. However, he has to negotiate the complexities of Japanese etiquette and Dutch-Japanese relations, as well as plots, embezzlement and love, whilst retaining his principles and furthering his ambitions. Mitchell's knowledge of and love for Japan shines through (he lived there for several years, and his wife is Japanese).
The sights, sounds, smells and whole atmosphere of Dejima are very vivid, but I found the much shorter passages set in a mountain shrine/convent more compelling plot-wise. However, that is more of a reflection of my tastes than Mitchell's writing.
LANGUAGE
I love the importance Mitchell attaches to language, both by demonstrating powerful imagery and more explicit praise of the power of the written word, such as "An ink-brush... is a skeleton key for a prisoner's mind". The book also explores issues of translation: the mischief to be had, along with the difficulties it can present.
SLAVERY
Another fascinating digression was a chapter as a first-person but unsentimental examination of the problems of being a slave (damned if you do and damned if you don't). He owns nothing except for his thoughts, and even then can cause problems. "The word 'my' brings pleasure. The word 'my' brings pain. These are true words for masters as well as slaves." This focus on power and exploitation is something that ties it to all Mitchell's other works.
FAVOURITE IMAGES
"A cacophony of frogs detonates."
"A hairy beggar kneeling over a puddle of vomit turns out to be a dog."
"The yeasty moon is caged in his half Japanese half Dutch window... glass panes melt the moonlight; paper panes filter it, to chalk dust."
"Light bleeds in around the casements: Jacob navigates the archipelago of stains across the low wooden ceiling."
Someone "savours his victory under an ill-fitting mask of empathy."
"An Oriental typhoon possesses a sentience and menace. Daylight is bruised."
"Birds are notched on the low sky. Autumn is aging."
"The weaverless loom of fortune" - is that godless predestination?
Someone's "face speaks of fatherlessness, name-calling and resilience".
"A face like his belongs on a cathedral gutter."
"The Oriental rain is fine as lace on the sailors' leathern faces."
LINKS WITH OTHER BOOKS
I have read all Mitchell's previous books and I thought this was the only one that does not have any explicit links to any of the others (beyond familiar themes of mortality, predacity, islands). The nearest I spotted was perhaps a nod at the title of his best-known work, "West to East, the sky unrolls and rolls its atlas of clouds" and the fact that Jacob is somewhat similar character to Adam Ewing in "Cloud Atlas" (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...).
However, in this interview about the book, Mitchell points out (1:30) "at least four" links to his other books, including that Adam Ewing's ship (from Cloud Atlas) is seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNpwR...
Update: This is effectively a prequel to The Bone Clocks, in which Marinus is a major character, and Mitchell has said there will be a trilogy of Marinus books. There is another strong carry-over element from this to The Bone Clocks as well (the immortality-seeking cult). So Jacob is not as much of a straightforward historical novel as it initially seemed.
I've written two, very different reviews of The Bone Clocks. They're with all my Mitchell reviews, here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
Japanese Creation Myth
Calico has written a fascinating review of Cloud Atlas that focuses on Japanese and western religious and philosophical aspects: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
He also pointed me to a Wikipedia page on the subject that is especially pertinent to the early sections of this book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese...
INTERVIEW WITH MITCHELL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOCTi...
(found by Ian, whose excellent review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
aaabsolute-favourites
china-japan-asia
favourites
...more
178 likes
Like
Comment
Profile Image for Violet wells.
Violet wells
433 reviews
3,287 followers
Follow
February 5, 2019
It's been a while since I read and loved this the first time and in the interim Mitchell has written two books which have caused me to think less of him as a novelist - The Bone Clocks and Slade House, both of which for me had a kind of juvenile silliness running through them. Therefore I was a bit worried of spoiling my wonderful memory of this book. Didn't
===
The Guardian
===
Review
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
A love story from 18th century Japan confirms David Mitchell as the most dazzling British novelist of his generation
Alexander Linklater
Sun 9 May 2010 09.01 AEST
2
Does it matter what books a novelist has written before? Should readers need to know an author's preceding works fully to grasp the new one?
It might simply have been a parlour game for fans and critics, but a subsidiary pleasure of David Mitchell's four previous novels lay in his weaving together of motifs, both within his stories and between them. In a typical manoeuvre, an incidental character from his first book, Ghostwritten (1999), would become a major one in his third, Cloud Atlas (2004). His fourth novel, Black Swan Green (2006), though more conventionally autobiographical than either, was littered with recurrences from, and clues to, both – as if worlds, both real and fictional, were endlessly intersecting.
Reappearing characters, cartwheeling symbols, tantalising leitmotifs, coincidences across time and space: the structural gymnastics of Mitchell's narratives made delightful play with what literary academics would call intertextuality. There was artistic continuity in this, but also the hint of an in-joke. You got it if you had read all the books – but not if you'd only read one. And what really made those books wonderful was not so much Mitchell's intertextual cleverness as his native, underlying gifts as a storyteller.
Now, however, with The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, he has moved on, jettisoned the cross-referencing, and severed the overt links to his previous books. It is interesting but unnecessary to know that the author has lived in Japan, is the father of half-Japanese children, and has set an earlier novel – number9dream (2001) – in the country. Equally, the fact that this new novel centres on a love story between a European man and a Japanese woman represents no more than the most elementary draw from autobiography. Beyond that, it is a self-standing historical novel, written in chronological order in the present tense, which conjures up a profoundly researched and fully realised world.
It takes place at the turn of the 18th century, in Edo-era Japan. The Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) has requisitioned the 120 metre-long artificial island of Dejima, in the bay of Nagasaki, as a trading post. Theirs is the most significant contact Japan has had with the outside world since Portuguese missionaries were expelled by the Tokugawa shogunate, and Christianity eradicated. That closing-off of Japan was described in Shusaku Endo's masterly and desolate 1966 novel, Silence, and Mitchell's book – teeming where Endo was bleak – is, in some sense, its successor. Dutch trade on the island is now the one opening Japan has to the outside world – a tiny valve for the exchange of goods and ideas.
Jacob de Zoet is an uptight young Dutch book-keeper, charged with cleaning up the accounts of an operation riddled with corruption as Dutch power fades and English naval power looms. Possessing no navy of its own, Japan is both fanatically insular and increasingly vulnerable. Encountering a beautiful but scarred Japanese midwife who has been granted some limited contact with European medicine, Jacob finds himself in thrall to a love forbidden by tradition, culture, politics and law.
The object of this ginger-haired naive's hopeless desire, Miss Aibagawa, is bound by the highly stratified social order of Japanese society and then purchased by the abbot of a secretive mountain shrine, where a form of sexual slavery is practised by the monks. A rescue attempt, in the form of a samurai raid on the shrine, briefly makes you suspect the novel is going to turn on a thriller plot but, thrilling as this episode actually is, it rather turns on the murk of politics and the complex allegiances of a feudal society. Miss Aibagawa is no cipher of the mysterious "other": her own medical gifts prove more useful to her than her would-be rescuers and, as a character, she is at least as fully realised as de Zoet.
With Enlightenment ideas and European corruption washing up to the Japanese coastline, Mitchell creates, in Dejima, a single, dramatic gateway through which to observe the encounter between civilisations from both sides.
There is no retreat, here, into the conventions of historical fiction. All Mitchell's architectural wizardry and verbal intensity are at play – but now subordinated solely into the service of his subject matter. As translators from Nagasaki attempt to deal with concepts rendered in Dutch, and vice versa, Mitchell renders communications and miscommunications in brilliantly supple and adaptive English. In the Dutch world you feel the Dutch-ness; in the Japanese world, you feel events taking place from within the consciousness of the Japanese characters. And when the English arrive, it takes a moment to realise that you are experiencing them as the aliens in the diplomatic triangle.
I doubt there is another living English writer who is capable of such traversals of worlds and consciousness. A criticism sometimes fired at Mitchell is that, beneath the virtuosity, he lacks an authentic voice of his own. There may be something in that, but it misses the real potential of his ventriloquism. Here, in this recreation of a historical moment, his transmigrations of empathy become fully emotionally satisfying. Ironically for an experimental writer, it is this seemingly simple step into a third-person, chronological narrative that feels like his greatest imaginative leap. This is the novel that establishes his maturity.
Which is not to say that it is faultless. So thoroughly does Mitchell saturate his world with the detail of his knowledge of it, that – particularly in the opening quarter – the labour of the writing can at times become a labour of reading. There are periods of stasis amid the brilliance, followed by sudden bounds of narrative momentum, which leave a feeling of unevenness. Descriptions of Nagasaki of the period are, at one point, lyrical to the point of – literally – rhyming. To feel the pleasure of this poetry, you have to extract it from its function and rhythm as prose. It is a very rare example in the book of virtuosity serving no other function than itself.
But Mitchell, aged 41 , has shown himself capable of sloughing off his earlier personas, digging deeper, going further, and staying new. This may not, quite, be a masterpiece, but it is unquestionably a marvel – entirely original among contemporary British novels, revealing its author as, surely, the most impressive fictional mind of his generation.
===
Empire of Desire
By Dave Eggers
July 1, 2010
Review of THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET
By David Mitchell
If any readers have doubted that David Mitchell is phenomenally talented and capable of vaulting wonders on the page, they have been heretofore silent. Mitchell is almost universally acknowledged as the real deal. His best-known book, “Cloud Atlas,” is one of those how-the-holy-hell-did-he-do-it? modern classics that no doubt is — and should be — read by any student of contemporary literature.
That book, like much of Mitchell’s fiction, plays with narrative structure while never abandoning a traditional love of storytelling and an unmistakable affection for historical, and adventuresome, settings. Now comes “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” which retains those narrative tendencies while abandoning the structural complexities often (and often wrongly) called postmodern. This new book is a straight-up, linear, third-person historical novel, an achingly romantic story of forbidden love and something of a rescue tale — all taking place off the coast of Japan, circa 1799. Postmodern it’s not.
Jacob de Zoet, the nephew of a pastor, is a wide-eyed and educated young clerk with the Dutch East Indies Company who arrives in Dejima, a small port on the southwest coast of Japan. Because Edo-era Japan is closed to all foreigners, and no Japanese national is allowed to leave the island, this port is actually a detached and floating city, anchored off the mainland near Nagasaki. It’s populated by an unseemly group of strivers and dead-enders, nearly all of whom are untrustworthy or inscrutable or both. De Zoet is there to make a name for himself in the company, save some money and go back to Holland within a few years, in time to marry his beloved Anna, for whom he pines often and deeply.
When he arrives, Dejima is a mess. Relations between the Japanese and their only European trading partners, the Dutch, are tense. The Japanese are haughty and dismissive, the Dutch greedy and disrespectful. And, most crucially to de Zoet, the company’s bookkeeping is a disaster. His job is to make a clean accounting of the past five years’ ledgers, and to set a straighter path going forward. But there are plenty who do not want an honest accounting. Both the Dutch and Japanese are either skimming or stealing outright. De Zoet begins to believe he is the lone idealist among his countrymen there, and perhaps the only honest man walking the filthy streets of Dejima. But his high-mindedness is unwelcome. Having reorganized the books, he is first praised for his diligence and later ostracized for going too far in his pursuit of malfeasance.
Meanwhile, he has a few things of his own to hide. The first is the Psalter he has smuggled in (Christianity was unwanted in Japan at the time, its texts forbidden). The second is his growing fondness for a young well-born midwife known as Miss Aibagawa. De Zoet, tortured, wants to be faithful to Anna, even though she had given him permission, while they’re apart, to satisfy his male urges. But though many Dutch hire prostitutes or find what they call a Dejima wife, Miss Aibagawa is neither. The independent-minded and well-educated Miss Aibagawa, having saved the life of the local magistrate’s baby, is given privileges rarely extended to women of the era. She studies with Dutch doctors and moves freely among the mostly male population of Dejima. And though a facial scar renders her unmarriageable to those of her father’s standing, she soon comes to the attention of de Zoet, who is instantly smitten.
After a brief encounter, during which she hands him fruit from her garden and he blurts out his interest, he climbs the island’s watchtower, his head swimming in thoughts of her. And here Mitchell’s incredible prose is on stunning display. It’s worth a long excerpt, so here goes:
“Hollows from the fingers of Aibagawa Orito are indented in her ripe gift, and he places his own fingers there, holds the fruit under his nostrils, inhales its gritty sweetness, and rolls its rotundity along his cracked lips. I regret my confession, he thinks, yet what choice did I have? He eclipses the sun with her persimmon: the planet glows orange like a jack-o’-lantern. There is a dusting around its woody black cap and stem. Lacking a knife or spoon, he takes a nip of waxy skin between his incisors and tears; juice oozes from the gash; he licks the sweet smears and sucks out a dribbling gobbet of threaded flesh and holds it gently, gently, against the roof of his mouth, where the pulp disintegrates into fermented jasmine, oily cinnamon, perfumed melon, melted damson . . . and in its heart he finds 10 or 15 flat stones, brown as Asian eyes and the same shape. The sun is gone now, cicadas fall silent, lilacs and turquoises dim and thin into grays and darker grays.”
Yes, Mitchell knows how to write about lust held at bay, and the love story offers the book’s greatest rewards. (Could there be fewer pages about the ins and outs of the accounting of the Dutch East Indies Company? Perhaps.) Eventually de Zoet decides he needs to make some kind of proposal, but just as he does — by having a Japanese interpreter present her with a gift of a Dutch-Japanese dictionary, a letter from him enclosed — Miss Aibagawa disappears.
And so for a time, the novel becomes an urgent adventure story. It turns out that to forgive debts incurred by her father, who has recently died, Miss Aibagawa has been bequeathed to a pseudo-respectable demigod who runs a kind of bizarre nunnery called the Mount Shiranui Shrine, where the women are drugged and impregnated and kept for decades against their will. Miss Aibagawa is told it will be 20 years before she is able to see the World Below again. De Zoet learns of her captivity and is determined to rescue her, but complications, too many to mention, arise.
Whether de Zoet succeeds is only partially the point of the narrative, for this is a book about many things: about the vagaries and mysteries of cross-cultural love; about faith versus science; about the relative merits of a closed society versus one open to ideas and development (and the attendant risks and corruptions); about the purity of isolation (human and societal) versus the messy glory of contact, pluralism and global trade. It captures Japan at a crucial time in its history, on the cusp of opening its borders and becoming a world power, and catches Holland as its own colonial prominence is waning.
If the book sounds dense, that’s because it is. It’s a novel of ideas, of longing, of good and evil and those who fall somewhere in between. And are there even nods to the story of Persephone, also born of privilege, also found plucking exotic fruit, also abducted — whose removal from the world causes the world’s seasons? Maybe, maybe not. There are no easy answers or facile connections in “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.” In fact, it’s not an easy book, period. Its pacing can be challenging, and its idiosyncrasies are many. But it offers innumerable rewards for the patient reader and confirms Mitchell as one of the more fascinating and fearlesswriters alive.
THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET
By David Mitchell
Illustrated. 479 pp. Random House. $26
===
No comments:
Post a Comment