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Summary
Summary
A New York Times Bestseller -- The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the Japanese Empire's single port and sole window onto the world, and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. Here Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk, has five years to earn a sufficient fortune to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland. But Jacob's intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with the daughter of a samurai doctor.
Author Notes
David Mitchell was born in Merseyside, England on January 12, 1969. He received a degree in English and American literature and an M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Kent. Before becoming a full-time writer, he taught English to technical students in Japan. His first novel, Ghostwritten, was published in 1999 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Two of his novels, Number9dream and Cloud Atlas, were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2012, Cloud Atlas was made into a major motion picture film starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. His other works include Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, The Bone Clocks, and Slade House. He and his wife translated into English a book written by an autistic 13-year-old Japanese boy entitled The Reason I Jump.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Mitchell's rightly been hailed as a virtuoso genius for his genre-bending, fiercely intelligent novels Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas . Now he takes something of a busman's holiday with this majestic historical romance set in turn-of-the-19th-century Japan, where young, naïve Jacob de Zoet arrives on the small manmade island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor as part of a contingent of Dutch East Indies officials charged with cleaning up the trading station's entrenched culture of corruption. Though engaged to be married in the Netherlands, he quickly falls in hopeless love with Orito Aibagawa, a Dutch-trained Japanese midwife and promising student of Marinus, the station's resident physician. Their "courtship" is strained, as foreigners are prohibited from setting foot on the Japanese mainland, and the only relationships permitted between Japanese women and foreign men on Dejima are of the paid variety. Jacob has larger trouble, though; when he refuses to sign off on a bogus shipping manifest, his stint on Dejima is extended and he's demoted, stuck in the service of a vengeful fellow clerk. Meanwhile, Orito's father dies deeply in debt, and her stepmother sells her into service at a mountaintop shrine where her midwife skills are in high demand, she soon learns, because of the extraordinarily sinister rituals going on in the secretive shrine. This is where the slow-to-start plot kicks in, and Mitchell pours on the heat with a rescue attempt by Orito's first love, Uzaemon, who happens to be Jacob's translator and confidant. Mitchell's ventriloquism is as sharp as ever; he conjures men of Eastern and Western science as convincingly as he does the unscrubbed sailor rabble. Though there are more than a few spots of embarrassingly bad writing ("How scandalized Nagasaki shall be, thinks Uzaemon, if the truth is ever known"), Mitchell's talent still shines through, particularly in the novel¿s riveting final act, a pressure-cooker of tension, character work, and gorgeous set pieces. It's certainly no Cloud Atlas , but it is a dense and satisfying historical with literary brawn and stylistic panache. (July ) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Another Booker Prize nomination is likely to greet this ambitious and fascinating fifth novela full-dress historical, and then somefrom the prodigally gifted British author (Black Swan Green, 2006, etc.).In yet another departure from the postmodern Pynchonian intricacy of his earlier fiction, this is the story of a devout young Dutch Calvinist (the eponymous Jacob) sent in 1799 to Japan, where the Dutch East India Company, aka the VOC, had opened trade routes more than two centuries earlier. But now the Company is threatened by the envious British Empire, which seeks to appropriate the Far East's rich commercial opportunities. Jacob's purpose is to acquire sufficient wealth and experience to earn the hand of his fiance Anna. But his mission is to serve as a ship's clerk while simultaneously investigating charges of corruption against the Company's powerful Chief Resident. When a scandal involving the seizure of the much-desired commodity of copper is manipulated to implicate Jacob, he is posted to the artificially constructed island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, becoming a de facto prisoner of an insular little world of rigorously patterned and controlled culturaland commercialrituals. Meanwhile, the story of Aibagawa Orita, a facially disfigured (hence unmarriageable) midwife authorized to study with the Company's doctor (the saturnine Marinus, a kind of Pangloss to Jacob's earnest Candide), punished for having aspired beyond her station, and the moving story of her planned escape from servitude and reunion with the beloved (Uzaeman) forbidden to marry her (which contains deft echoes of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Ondaatje's The English Patient), mocks, as it exalts, Jacob's concealed love for this extraordinary woman. The story climaxes as British forces challenge the Dutch hold on the East's riches, and Jacob's long ordeal hurtles toward its conclusion.It's as difficult to put this novel down as it is to overestimate Mitchell's virtually unparalleled mastery of dramatic construction, illuminating characterizations and insight into historical conflict and change. Comparisons to Tolstoy are inevitable, and right on the money. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Two-time Booker finalist Mitchell applies his wide-ranging talents to this innovative historical epic. Dejima, an artificial island created as a trading outpost in Nagasaki Harbor, proves fertile ground for exploring intercultural relations, trust and betrayal, racial and gender boundaries, the search for identity, and unexpected love in a changing world. In 1799, when the Netherlands held a trade monopoly with isolationist Japan, Jacob de Zoet, a clerk for the Dutch East Indies Company, is charged with uncovering fraud in his predecessors' ledgers. As Jacob doggedly pursues an honest course, he becomes romantically intrigued by Orito Aibagawa, a gifted, disfigured midwife granted special permission to study on Dejima. Mitchell incorporates diverse styles, and he expertly adapts tone and dialogue to reflect his situations. In the main plotline, incisive commentary on decisions and unforeseen consequences filters through a jaunty, slang-filled tale in which Japanese and Dutchmen arrange public and private deals. Interlinked subplots offer creepy gothic drama, seafaring adventure, and race-against-time suspense. Despite the audacious scope, the focus remains intimate; each fascinating character interpreter, herbalist, magistrate, slave has the opportunity to share his or her story. Everything is patched together seamlessly and interwoven with clever wordplay and enlightening historical details on feudal Japan. First-rate literary fiction and a rousing good yarn, too.--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
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 an 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 post-modern. This new book is a straight-up, linear, third-person historical novel, 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 welleducated 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 Ups. 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 fearless writers alive. This novel captures Japan on the cusp of becoming a world power, and Holland as its prominence is waning. Dave Eggers is the editor of McSweeney's and the author, most recently, of "Zeitoun."
Library Journal Review
Two-time Man Booker Prize nominee Mitchell's fifth novel is an outstanding historical epic that brings to life early 19th-century xenophobic Japan. Divided into five parts, it opens with the title character's stint on the quarantined Dutch outpost of Dejima, where he falls in love with a local midwife who is later sold into service to pay off her late father's debts. British actors Jonathan Aris and Paula Wilcox maintain order amid this swirling narrative populated by myriad colorful characters. Though some of the passages are a bit awkward, this book will nonetheless interest Mitchell devotees and fans of history-based adventures. [The New York Times best-selling Random hc received a starred review, LJ 4/15/10.-Ed.]-Denise A. Garofalo, Mount Saint Mary Coll. Lib., Newburgh, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.