David Mitchell's "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet"

It seems like I have said so much about David Mitchell as a cunning writer in my previous entry for his book “Cloud Atlas”. I will not fall into the pit of being redundant so I will make it terse: this is a great book. “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet” is yet another oeuvre that’s an addition to a list of amazing books that I’ve read. Written in the traditional style of a novel the book takes the reader on a quest into 18^th century Japan, a time when it is in its shogun dominated era, in the midst of an inflicted isolation from the rest of the world. Most of the story took place in Dejima – a man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki built to serve as a center for trade and to keep foreigners from setting foot in the island. Though it is mostly centered on Jacob de Zoet, a clerk of the Dutch East Indies Company and his obsession for Orito Aibagawa, a student of science practicing midwifery at the Shirando School,  it is also a disclosure to the to the hostilities that took place in Japan during this era. These cruelties took a claim on “tradition” yet to the eyes of the westerners were sheer murder. We are hurled into the world of merchants, sailors, daimyos, slaves, interpreters, scholars, men of faith but with dark intentions, of crazed sisters at the nunnery and the strange murder that awaits them, of samurais, noble deaths, of love and its high price and of many things that shock, scare. In short: a thick brew of history where fact and fiction converged. It entails a stark dichotomy of the east and west. Another fascinating trait of the book is of how David Mitchell wrote it: it bore the terse poesy of a haiku. 

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“Cicadas hiss in the pines.

They sound like fat frying in a shallow pan.”

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“Night insects trill, tick, bore, ring; drill, prick, saw, sting.”

A take on religion added a compelling effect to the book. It held brilliant characters with strong religious convictions.

  “The purest believers, Shiroyama thinks, are the truest monsters”.

“Whoever claimed that history had no sense of humour died too soon.”