Download The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet eBook

Fascinating story. Brilliantly written. The "some sexual content" is written in obscure, sometime poetic, sometimes bored, no big deal language that is, in fact, not at all explicit. But you can figure it out, so I cannot say there is no sexual content. Plus one thread of the story follows a corrupt and sinister sexual cult run out of a shrine whose patron is the most powerful and dangerous Japanese official in the area. However, I would have given this book to my clever voraciously reading son, had it been around when he was 12 years old.

I could hardly put this novel down. I wanted the pleasure of reading it never to stop. I kept backtracking, rereading passages and whole chapters just for the delight of the language. I laughed out loud, and I cried. It is a very complicated story, populated by assorted con artists, ugly Dutch trading company exploiters of whatever they can find to exploit, whose racial attitudes are those of the 1700s. And the Japanese are no better, except that is it their country they are trying to protect from being overtaken by outsiders. Japanese society was extremely rigid, with horrible tortures and punishments for all kinds of apparently slight infractions. But then the Dutch at that time were brutal in their quest to grab chunks of "empire" away from England and Spain. Japan was one of the few places where the people being exploited for trade managed to contain the foreign invaders, and made the trading company follow their rules. (While in the same time period, England and Spain were imposing their systems of law, religion, and culture on their subjugated colonies, with not much care for what the locals thought or wanted.)

So in this time and place a young Dutch clerk, nephew of a protestant minister, has signed on with the Dutch Trading Company V.O.C. to make his fortune with a five year contract and return to Holland with enough money to win the heart of his future father-in-law, and be married to the girl he adores. We meet all the characters he has to live, work, and get along with, Dutch and Japanese, some earnest and fair, some merely greedy bastards, and some pure evil. He has to learn the language, keep his balance on the Company's tightrope while juggling the spoken and unspoken rules of both the the Company's and the Japanese officials' games.

This group of outsiders is contained on a small trading island of warehouses, offices, and rooming houses for the officials of the Company, with only the Company men and their slaves and servants (and local bar girls) for social interaction. They are restricted from entering Japan proper. Their interactions with the Japanese are limited to formal business, translations, accounts, stock inventories, negotiating contracts for sales of various commodities, and trials and punishments for those caught breaking the many strict and arbitrary Japanese laws. This is no kind of a "junket," nor is it a particularly posh posting. Exotic yes, but most of young Jacob's co-workers lack the imagination to appreciate their environment as anything other than something to be endured, with the dream of wealth at the end of their term. Jacob does appreciate his surroundings, applies himself to learning Japanese, treats people fairly and with respect, but he gets in trouble because he is honest, and refuses to wink at his superior's fraudulent schemes to enrich themselves.

The ending is not at all what I expected. I do not want to give anything away. It is both happier and sadder than I thought it might be. But it is a realistic and very satisfying end to a remarkable story. I have some Dutch ancestors, who in the 17th century went west, and ultimately ended up in one of England's colonies in North America. This book helps me imagine what their lives might have been, had they decided to sign on to a Dutch East Asia Company contract instead.

David Mitchell is a genius. Each of his books is distinctly his own, but also different from the others. Many of his books can be radically different from part to part within themselves. This particular novel is more of a self-contained story than other works of Mr. Mitchell's I've read, but even it has 3 very distinct plotlines occurring. The primary narrative focuses on the titular Jacob De Zoet, who has been sent to a Dutch trade outpost in 1800's Japan to look for evidence of graft being perpetrated by the previous Chief Resident. While there, he quickly makes enemies of those who benefited from the old way of doing things, but makes friends with an eccentric doctor and several Nagasaki locals. Things don't go as he, or anyone, really anticipates as we see loves won and lost, battles fought, corruption exposed, and a shocking secret society brought to light. The characters are well drawn and the story compelling, all adding up to a world you'll want to savor. As with his other novels I enjoyed this one immensely and look forward to reading again in the future, especially as the interconnected nature of his works is brought increasingly to light.

<rave>This is an incredible book.</rave>

Now that that's taken care of, I can try to discuss this rationally. This is another book that I would never have picked up on my own, but read thanks to the book club that meets every month and a half or so at my office.

I found the title puzzling until, about 3/4 of the way through the text, it is casually mentioned that one of Japan's names for itself is (or at least, was two hundred years ago) "The Land of a Thousand Autumns." So the title metynomizes to "The Japan of Jacob de Zoet." Which makes for a reasonably apt title.

The main character - though he hardly appears in the book's second part - is a clerk in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, and as the book opens, he arrives at Dejima, an artificial island off the shore of Nagasaki, the only place in Japan where Europeans were (officially) permitted for about two hundred years. He arrives with a new "Chief Resident," whose immediately announces that he is going to clean up the fraudulent books kept by his predecessor. Which predecessor, incidentally, he ships out in chains.

Cleaning up the books is the job of Clerk de Zoet, who goes about his work faithfully and enthusiastically - perhaps even with a bit of ambition. He meets the other Dutch inhabitants of Dejima, who are a fascinating cast of characters, and makes friends and enemies among them.

Along the way he meets a young Japanese woman named Orito Aibagawa, daughter of a samurai family, and falls in love (despite his engagement to a Dutch woman back home).

But this is not <b>Shogun</b>, and the two do not fall into bed together. Orito is spirited away as a nun in a mysterious abbey, whose Abbot Enomoto is a very powerful figure in Nagasaki, setting up part two and ending my summarizing of the book.

Mitchell's writing is spectacular without being flashy, if that makes sense. He draws the reader into the hearts of his various viewpoint characters effortlessly (I mean effortless for the reader; I am sure a great deal of effort went into creating these characters). They are distinct and distinctive, and I liked a lot of them a great deal more than I usually like characters in a historical novel.

So anyway: <rave>recommended</rave>.