Monday, August 30, 2010

Turning Japanese

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
by David Mitchell
2010, Random House


There's a cute little independent bookstore in Andover where I like to roam seemingly endlessly examining the staff picks. Occasionally I chat about books with the employees (I recently had a brief conversation about David Foster Wallace), but reading the little summaries and glowing reviews that point me in the direction of a good book is a satisfying activity.

Whenever I am in an indie bookstore, I try to buy a book, any book, to make up for the numerous titles I record in my cellphone's notepad feature for further investigation. Some time ago one such title was David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, a book that came with an effusive recommendation from an employee. That was not the book I picked up that day, but when David Mitchell published his fifth and newest novel last month, the name was instantly familiar to me and so with what wound up being great pleasure, I dove into it.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is an amazing book.

The plot centers around a red-headed Dutchman named de Zoet (or Dazuto, as the Japanese call him) who has been hired as a bookkeeper to straighten out the mismanaged and manipulated books of the Dutch East Indies Company. The company operates a trading port in Nagasaki referred to as Dejima, populated by a small handful of Dutchman, their slaves, and a bevvy of Japanese dignitaries, translators and students of foreign culture.

While the Japanese benefit a great deal from trading with foreigners, their attitude toward them remains stringently closed off. The Edo appoints translators to acquire the Dutch language and become accustomed to their cultures but dissemination of information about Japanese customs is strictly prohibited; the Japanese attempt to maintain as much mystery as possible. Foreigners are not permitted to learn the Japanese language, and all evidence of worship of foreign gods (Christianity, in main) are illegal.

Jacob de Zoet is intensely interested in Japanese culture and undertakes secretly acquiring their language as he balances his duty to the Dutch East Indies Company and love of his god. Eventually, the underhanded behaviors de Zoet was hired to clear up conspire to strand him in Japan for a very long time, during which he falls in love with a forbidden, scarred Japanese girl studying midwifing techniques.

The plot eventually becomes quite rollicking, if you can believe that. There are a substantial enough number of twists, turns and cliff-hangers to keep me reading quickly and insatiably.

Thematically, Mitchell seems preoccupied with the collision of cultures in Jacob de Zoet. Of particular interest is the problem of translation. Although the book is written in English, the characters are speaking English, Dutch or Japanese, depending on the character and often the characters clarify one another's expressions with more precise vocabulary. The effect is puzzling, as the reader is fluent in English. While this might read as a historical necessity in the context of the novel, it recurs often enough to elevate it to a leitmotif.

The Japanese ideal of preserving their culture from foreign infection plays heavily thematically, too. de Zoet is essentially homeless throughout the novel. His reminiscences of his home in the Netherlands are half-dreamed remembrances, and for all intents and purposes Japan is his home. Yet, the Japanese forbid him to partake in either his culture (he keeps an illicit book of psalms under a floorboard) or theirs (his interest in the scarred beauty is forbidden, the language kept secret).

de Zoet is orphaned in a way on an island that uses him but will give nothing of itself back, an intractable position as Mitchell demonstrates later when the English attempt to establish trade. The Japanese are shown to mismanage their dealings with the foreigners to disastrous consequences and the novel begins to evoke a peculiar atmosphere. Mitchell's book is steeped in the past; he virtually fetishizes the details of sailing, for example, and exalts in the happy collision of accurate medical data (child labor) and superstition (bloodletting).

Yet this nostalgic atmosphere is tinged with a struggle to grow out of itself, just as de Zoet chafes at the confines of the magisterial constraints imposed upon him. Mitchell depicts an era at the brink of change, with constituents pushing for and against that change equally, creating an intensely alluring tousle between antiquity and modernity, mystery and science, romance and pragmatism.

Mitchell's writing is simply lovely. It is direct but nuanced with character. Throughout the novel he is prone to a slightly koan-esque syntax; for example, "In the ginkgo's knotted heart, a brood of oily crows fling insults."

I hesitate to say more about the book, in part because of the difficulty of enunciating praise, as opposed to condemnation. At 500 pages, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is neither a quick nor easy read, but it is so incredibly compelling that it is well worth the investment of both time and energy.

6 comments:

  1. I've read a fair range of reviews on this one. I'm reading his Ghostwritten at the moment. The plan is to work through sequentially, so it'll be a while before I get to this (assuming I keep liking him, but so far Ghostwritten's pretty good).

    It's a fascinating time and place. Did it seem to you more of a plot and character novel or an ideas novel or a bit of both?

    Also, site query. I notice you don't have a recent comments section. Have you considered having one? Also, for some reason once I hit post comment it takes literally five to ten minutes for the comment then to actually post. Has anyone else mentioned anything like that?

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  2. The novel seemed very much a plot and character-driven novel, which isn't to say there weren't a great many ideas (there were) but that they were addressed skillfully and subtly as opposed to an ideas-oriented novel by the likes of Paul Auster, for example.

    I've heard some problems about posting comments from a few friends (perhaps that explains the dearth of them?) but I don't really know what to do about that.

    I've thought about having a recent comments section, but I don't know that I get enough to justify it?

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  3. Is the place in Andover a bookstore that sells second hand books or brand new? Just curious?

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  4. The Andover Bookstore (http://hugobookstores.com/andover) sells new books only.

    There's a small little place on 125 in Plaistow that sells a mix of new and secondhand.

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  5. I'm not sure what the posting issue is. I used to be on blogspot and switched over (very painlessly, it's automated and transfers content) to Wordpress which I've found much more user friendly. It could be an incompatibilty between the two.

    Anyway, I've added you to my blogroll to remind myself to pop by. You cover some interesting books.

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  6. I did the same to you. I appreciate (and am flattered by) the readership.

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