Book Review: The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob de Zoet

The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob de Zoet
David Mitchell
Sceptre
470 pages

Set in the port of Dejima, Japan in the late 18th and early 19th century, David Mitchell’s new novel is the story of a staunchly Christian Jacob de Zoet, an employee of the Dutch East India Company.

The Company is the only contact Japan has with the rest of the world, having closed off its borders. Jacob discovers that the Company, like all other colonial enterprises from the period, was ridden with corruption.

He is entrusted with the task of remedying the Company’s many problems. This, the first part of the novel, also has short accounts of the mercantile mechanisms of a European nation in Japan. (At the time in which the novel is set, the English East India Company was going through similar startling discoveries and clean-up operations.) 

Despite warnings about Japanese intolerance for this sort of thing, Jacob falls in love with a disfigured Japanese midwife, Orito Abigawa. The cross-cultural love story begins with some amazing prose. When she hands him some fruit from her garden, he confesses his love for her:  

“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.”

Having admitted to his love, Jacob awaits her response, but then the course of true love never did run smooth, and certainly does not, in insular, excessively well-mannered but hard-as-tungsten Dejima. Aibagawa disappears and the novel now — essentially its second part — takes on the shape of an adventure story, as Jacob seeks her out.

Jacob’s escapades and comic capers take up space here in what reads like a mix of Don Quixote and a detective novel with warriors, spies, plain idiots and well-intentioned helpmates. Abigawa has been sold into slavery as a mode of payment of her family’s debts, and she is taken to a remote nunnery run by a warlord, Enomoto, who drugs the girls and makes them sex slaves. She escapes, but still requires rescue as Enomoto has been thwarted and defeated by this girl.

Meanwhile, Jacob has a hell of a job battling the recalcitrant Company officials who have no intention of becoming honest. The third part of the novel is vintage colonial tale, where the Company and the Dutch try to seek concessions and trading rights from the Japanese, with all the bullying, threatening, conniving techniques they can muster. But there is something Jacob is also trying to hide — a Psalter that he has smuggled into Japan (which has banned Christianity and any of its relics). Will he triumph and secure his love? Well, find out.

Mitchell’s prose is stunning and calliper-precise. There is considerable realism (the encyclopaediac information on the Company’s account keeping, for example!) that sometimes gets to the reader. The love story of Abigawa and Jacob is oddly done, because Jacob is missing for vast stretches of the book as it turns to the story of Abigawa.

The prose paints details with the fidelity of a camera (though it can get a bit too detailed at times), and the sheer beauty of the descriptions takes you along in passages like these: “There is a girl in an upper window; there are red lanterns hanging from the eaves, and she is idly tickling the hollow of her throat with a goose feather” or “A hairy beggar kneeling over a puddle of vomit turns out to be a dog”.

Mitchell tries very hard to avoid exoticising Japan, though the bizarre nunnery and the warlord-ism detract a bit from this attempt. Mitchell gets into the mind of the characters (we are even given their thoughts in italics, almost as though Mitchell did not trust us to discover they were inside the characters’ heads).

Mitchell’s Number9Dream (2001), like The Thousand Autumns..., was also a Japan tale. If the earlier novel was a kind of ‘growing up’ tale, the new one is far more ‘culturalist’, seeking to give us a detailed view of 18th century Japan. He experimented with form in Number9Dream.

There is a chapter Nine which is empty — it is yet to be written! His first novel Ghostwritten (1999) drew upon the Tokyo subway gas attacks by the Aum cult and relies, like Number9Dream, on random incidents that ‘touch’ each other, even though we discover these only towards the very end, and even then we are not sure if we can rely on them, for they could just be hallucinations of the main character. The Thousand Autumns... is a considerable shift from such strange plots and writing, but the pleasure of reading Mitchell is consistent.

Eminently readable for the prose, and the sheer monumental work on Japan and the colonial transactions, Mitchell’s new novel might deter some due to its bulk, but those who persist will find it a satisfying read.