Steve's Reviews > The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

I was happy to see Mitchell try his hand at historical fiction. While he’s always been considered an immensely skilled writer and a superb storyteller, it's his inventive structuring that seems to bring forth the highest praise. Read Cloud Atlas to see if you agree. With this most recent work, as he said in a post-publication interview, he was trying a more straightforward narrative form – one without gewgaws (I think that was the word he used, or maybe it was “jiggery-pokery”). I’m pleased to report that he succeeded beyond all expectations, even with the ropes of convention constraining him.

Jacob was an earnest young Dutchmen amongst the motley assemblage at a remote trading post on Dejima, an island near Nagasaki. The story began in 1799 at a time when Japan was a very closed society. In fact, the isolated post offered the only real exposure to the Western way of life. Unfortunately, honor was scarce on all sides of a typical Dutch East Indies Company transaction. Jacob, a junior clerk at the time, did meet some virtuous people, though. Foremost among them was a midwife named Orito Aibagawa who was studying medicine under Marinus, the highly skilled, highly evolved physician on the island. Orito was a promising student, empathetic, and attractive despite a bad burn mark on the side of her face. Young Jacob was smitten.

Romance wasn’t easy, though, for reasons the reader soon discovers. Jacob had other travails, too, when he refused to falsify one of the shipping documents. He was demoted and made to report to a conniving, downright scurvy rival. Then Orito was sent away. And it sure didn’t help matters when the language and culture were so different and there were so few people he could trust.

I’d rather not get too deep into the plot (though it’s a worthy one) and instead focus on the book’s other qualities. I’m convinced that David Mitchell is incapable of committing a bad sentence to paper. He’s also very good with character development as we see with Jacob, Orito, and various translators, magistrates, and seafarers. And that rare storytelling ability I mentioned, it takes the action well beyond the island. He leads us up a mountain to a nunnery harboring secrets and to treacherous parts of the Japanese shogunate.

I was already a big Mitchell fan so it was interesting to me to see the contrasts with his earlier works. One thing that was different was the immense amount of research involved in putting a book like this together. In fact, there is a section at the end where Mitchell appends a short essay on the topic of historical fiction. He said he’d tried earlier to apply the antiquated language of the times, making “extensive word lists to incorporate into [his] text—and ended up with Blackadder.” He also mentioned the danger in showing off his recently acquired scholarship at the expense of narrative flow. Even so, one criticism of the book was that he may have gone a little too far with his descriptive passages. Once the story gained momentum, though, that was no longer an issue.

I wanted to give this the full five stars, but in the end couldn’t quite do it. My problem was with Jacob. He seemed a tad too forthright, at times, with a lack of people smarts. We admire his integrity and hard work, but can’t always see his human aspect. Maybe it’s just that I’m so used to really liking (or at least understanding the frailties of) Mitchell’s main characters and had been hoping to do so again. Overall, though, this was a great reading experience. And my view of Mitchell himself is still as high as any cloud in the sky, mapped or otherwise.