The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland. But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings. As one cynical colleague asks, “Who ain’t a gambler in the glorious Orient, with his very life?” [1]
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What Hacker News says
- This is a delightful historical fiction if you're into this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thousand_Autumns_of_Jacob_...
Also there's a museum. It's on my list!
- I’m reading Wolf Hall. It’s amazing how much more history is ‘sinking in’ when told as historical fiction.
Recommended, as is The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, for the same reason. Also that’s just beautifully written.
- The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is lovely and the contrast between the Dutch and the Japanese cultures in the 18th century is quite striking.
- If you enjoyed The Bone Clocks, consider trying the other books in that same universe. Like The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (particularly if you enjoy its historical setting of Edo period Japan on the artificial island of Deshima where the Dutch were allowed to operate a trading post), or the shorter Slade House.
Of course Cloud Atlas is well-known and a good read.
Utopia Avenue, his latest work about a fictional band in the 1960s, is a very pleasant and frankly fun read too, although different from the others. In typical Mitchell fashion, it does loosely connect to his other works and that weird über-narrative he is building. I'm looking forward to see what he'll end up doing with that.
- Very much agree that the UFO thing is a red herring. But perhaps Occam's Razor actually points to an even simpler explanation, that of it being a reoccurring mythological trope that was repackaged as an historical event.
That said, I would love if it actually were the case that a mysterious woman from, say, the Dutch East Indies — to make up a random, semi-plausible example — really did wash ashore in a Japanese fishing village. Sounds like a sequel to "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" (awesome book by the way).
- The Bone Clocks and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet are both greatly entertaining novels as well (and tangentially related to both, the shorter novel Slade House).
Personally I found these more enjoyable than Cloud Atlas, which is good and a must-read nonetheless, but relies a lot on its narrative structure for its effect (this is not a negative, but the Matryoshka doll structure of the book does define it rather strongly).
