"The Soul is a Verb. Not a Noun." The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell

I just finished a terrific novel by one my favorite contemporary writers, David Mitchell. I've read all of his novels, and this, his most recent, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is a simply astonishing historical novel, which has recently been released as a paperback. He is best known for his experimental novel Cloud Atlas 2004, which has been adapted for a  big budget theatrical release in mid-2012. More recently I read his previous novel, Black Swan Green, a coming of age novel set in rural England which is equally great. He is definitely a gifted writer, and his latest novel aptly demonstrates how hard he works at his craft.

I can only speculate as to how much research went into the creation of this novel. Clearly he has done a lot. That this book is not more celebrated may be because the story is something people at least in the US don't care to read about, a Dutch trading outpost in Japan at the end of the 18th Century. I'm very aware of his abilities so I trust his judgement. If this was being plugged as a movie perhaps someone would say, "Yeah, it's good..., but why not set it just before World War II, or why not make the title character American?". Which of course would be a silly notion to anyone who has read this book. So many themes are interwoven here, contact between two cultures, prejudice, modernization versus tradition, love and survival, honor and betrayal, language and worldviews. Intellectual ideas are bandied about in an authentic way--sometimes writers overdo this and it becomes more about them than actually furthering the story.

So it is 1799, and the capable young clerk Jacob De Zoet is arriving at Dejima, an artificial island just off the coast of Nagasaki created for Dutch traders to prevent them from having contact with the mainland. He arrives with Vorstenbosch, the new head of Dejima, sent to ferret out the evident corruption and irregularities discovered at this outpost. De Zoet is out to make a fortune for himself so that he can return to Holland and marry. You are then quickly introduced to the world of the Dutch East India Company, the people who have chosen this maritime mercantile life and who managed to survive its rigors. But early on in his tenure he becomes enchanted with a young Japanese woman who is studying medicine with Dr Marinus, the company doctor who DeZoet forms an intellectual bond with.

The setting of the novel is fascinating, Japan a few generations before its modernization phase. The Japanese obviously want some of the things that the Dutch have to offer, but they don't want them  to have any significant contact or influence on their society, ideas, mannerisms, dress. In a way Dejima is a prison, albeit a potentially lucrative one for the Dutch traders. The Dutch obviously want to trade with the Japanese, but this is not the Colonial period when the terms of trade were dictated by the West unilaterally. Human nature is funny, and in order to trade there has to be some contact. And it is natural for people to be curious. Technology, ideas about governance, and modern medicine are of interest to some of the Japanese officials and certainly Japanese society is of great interest to DeZoet and Dr Marinus. But like anything else it took a period of time and intervening events before there was a sea change in Japanese society away from cultural introspection.

I don't want to go too far with explaining this story. It is a masterfully rendered piece of historical fiction, a thumbnail sketch in some ways, but in other ways universalic. You gain a good understanding of the mercantile world and the new colonial mindset and life in pre-Modern Japan. The amazing thing is that he has created a real world here, plausible from both a European and Japanese perspective. And he uses a variety of narrators to illuminate us with different perspectives, both from the mindsets of different characters, but also from characters regaling us with their tales of how they wound up in Dejima.

So it is a love story, but it is also a bit of a horror story. I don't want to disclose the details. But the story is all so seamlessly integrated. And once you are introduced to the main characters and you are brought up to speed to Nagasaki life in 1799, the narrative takes off, and the novel quickly becomes a page turner. And there are numerous moments in this novel when the prose is simply vivid, breathtaking and transcendent. The attention to detail is similarly striking.

So do yourself a favor and read this interesting novel. It was a fascinating story and I learned some new things in the process. Then you'll want to read his back catalogue.