The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet - David Mitchell, 2010.

David Mitchell, during an interview, once asked himself the question,
“Would I have become the same writer if I’d spent the last six years in London, or Cape Town, or Moose Jaw, or on an oil rig or in the circus?”
with reference to the time he spent in Japan after graduating from Kent University. Considering that four of his five novels are based predominantly around Japan and East Asia, the answer, as he himself is probably aware, is a resounding ‘no’. And it is for this time spent teaching English in the Orient that we must be thankful. While Mitchell’s previous novel, Black Swan Green, was nothing to complain about, the early 1980s Worcestershire setting of the author’s youth lacked the mythical mysticism, and ability as a storyteller, of his other works. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is a gratifying return to his unique method that has made him one of the most exciting writers of his generation.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet recalls the Kansei-era Japan of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, a world closed to foreign influence, where Christianity is a crime and honour and deference the highly-valued virtues. In this mysterious land there is but one nook of occidental influence, the man-made island of Dejima, off the Nagasaki coast, the trading post of the Dutch East India company, where the only Europeans in Japan must live, and never cross to the mainland. De Zoet falls in love with a Japanese midwife (Mitchell himself is married to a Japanese woman), however her sudden disappearance provides the Dutch clerk with the grounds to discover the dark occurrences happening behind Japanese officials’ shady dealings, and their ambiguous moral codes, twisted into rationality by misread Buddhist teachings. Mitchell intersperses his chapters regarding De Zoet’s unattainable love with others pertaining to the downfall of the Dutch East India company, and the onset of the British on Dejima, as her vast nineteenth century global empire began to take shape.

The sheer research Mitchell must have put in to write The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is staggering. A firm knowledge of Japanese tradition and lifestyle is evident from Mitchell’s previous novels Ghostwritten and number9dream, however the secretive nature of Japan two centuries ago is akin to writing a accurate encyclopaedia today of Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea. Coupled with this, the author’s child-like imagination is unparalleled in contemporary English literature; such metaphor and similie regularly causes the reader to stop and re-read out of utter delight, whilst the page or so of rhyming description at the start of one of De Zoet’s later chapters is fresh, unexpected and exceptionally beautiful.

David Mitchell's fifth novel is one which will ensnare all but the most closed minds, a lengthened fable which posterity will hopefully treasure in both university libraries and children’s bedside tables for years to come.