-- The Ten thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along …
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
--- Musee des Beaux Arts W.H. Auden
On the cusp of the 19th century and the
verge of change, an honest clerk, Jacob de Zoet, arrives in Dejima, an artificial
island off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan. The island serves as a remote trading
post for the collapsing Dutch East Indies Trading Company, headquartered in
Batavia, (modern-day Jakarta). Shut-off Japan is called the “Cloistered
Empire,” the Tokugawa Shogunate’s reaction to attempts by Portugal and the Spain
to bring commerce and Christianity to its shores. No Japanese may leave and return to the island
on penalty of death; foreigners are rarely allowed onto the mainland.
Such is the exotic, isolated setting of David
Mitchell’s The Ten Thousand Autumns of
Jacob de Zoet. The island hosts a
small community of company officials, seafaring rogues from many nations,
Japanese whores, interpreters and spies. In addition, the American Captain Anselm Lacy
and the motley crew of the Shenandoah, and Japanese lords and magistrates interact
with those on Dejima. The world is in
flux. Elsewhere democracies are being
born. Enlightenment ideas including medicine and science are spreading. Dutch influence is waning and the British Empire
is expanding. Dejima, where many nations
and religions are represented and cultures cluster, nestles next to a land unchanged
for centuries – one poetically referred to as the land of Ten thousand autumns
or Root of the sun.
Jacob is charged, under the leadership of Unico Vorstenbosch,
with scrutinizing the cooked books and the crooked practices of those stationed
in a place where everyone gambles, often with their lives, and the future of
the company and the Dutch empire is at stake.
De Zoet becomes the butt of jokes, the subject of
other’s schemes, the scapegoat for Vorstenbosch’s actions and the loser in
rigged card games. But he’s nobody’s
fool in commerce. He quickly learns to counter through observation and
disarming moves of his own. The same does not apply however, to romance. Though
De Zoet has promised to marry Anna who waits in Holland, he’s a fool for love as
he falls for the one Japanese woman on Dejima who is not a whore or a whore’s
helper. Aibagawa Orito, a disfigured midwife, successfully delivered an infant
to a local magistrate, thus earning her wish to study with Dr. Marinus,
Dejima’s Dutch doctor. Skeptical Dr.
Marinus, tests De Zoet’s intentions and desire for friendship in the most
humiliating of ways. De Zoet, In turn,
uses Marinus and an interpreter, Ogawa Uzaemon, as go-betweens to arrange
meetings and send letters.
All of the small
maneuvers and counter plays of the Dejima dwarf to child’s play when De Zoet
meets Lord Abbott Enomoto and conflicts in commerce and romance intertwine. The
heart of the novel moves to a cloister deep in the Cloistered Empire, where an
eerie cult worships at an ancient temple. The novel takes on the darker shades
of dystopian literature – motifs in common though to creepier effect with Lois
Lowry’s The Giver and Kazuo
Ishiguro’s Never let Me Go.
David Mitchell writes with great sweep and fine
detail. He explores issues like slavery – sexual and otherwise, the uses and
abuses of religion, the exploitation of resources and people, the relationships
of father and son, children of mixed heritage and the dynamic nature of history
all within lively storytelling. At times
this historical novel reads as a story of courtship and love – complete with a
triangle, at others as a robust adventure tale of exotic lands and seafaring
scoundrels, as a fair-lady rescue drama, a tale of sacrifices by both fathers
and children and as a David-versus-Goliath battle story.
While The Thousand
Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is story strong and grounded in historical fact
(fire, earthquakes etc. , and the attack of a British ship named the Phaeton
all did in fact occur), adventure and romance take place as in a painting revealing
the bustle of busyness, the distractions (though not indifference)
of ordinary life.
The world is alive with activity just as Auden suggests
it is in paintings by the “old masters.” There is always something going on
beneath the dialogue, on top of the observation, around the action. Rats rut in
the rafters while Jacob tries to concentrate on his work, making him think of
women. While Jacob tries to sleep this
is what he hears: “Night insects trill, tick, bore, ring, drill prick, saw,
sting./ Hanzaburo snores in the
cubbyhole outside Jacob’s door.”
And like the Flemish painter Brueghel’s "The Fall of Icarus,"
there is a sun myth that involves fathers and sons in the book’s climax, though
not that of Icarus. It is the myth of Phoebus and his son Phaeton – a child of
mixed heritage who struggles to prove his paternity. This myth’s pattern is
reversed by the ship Phaeton’s drugged captain as he attacks Dejima and sees Jacob
courageously take a stand.
Sometimes action is
layered into storytelling, the way an actor engages in some telling stage
business. A card game, a billiards game
and the game of Go are all played out both physically and verbally and more is
at stake than meets the eye.
Mitchell uses the same layering technique of gambling
games and action as the interpreters do their work. Language and renaming,
Interpreting and reinterpreting in order to dominate, control, deceive or
deflect, is one of many ways some maintain power. Renaming for evil purposes peaks in Enomoto’s
temple. But translators and Enomoto are not alone in relabeling or using language for one’s purposes. While De Zoet becomes DaZuto in Japanese pronunciation, Domburger— a term referring to Jacob’s provincial home is used initially pejoratively by Marinus to put Jacob in his place. Thus, The Ten Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet could be called DaZuto’s Japan or even Domburger’s Dejima but both of the later would lessen the eloquence of the story’s meshing of historical sweep and individual life.
Mitchell uses an odd metaphor when De Zoet first meets
Enomoto: “Jacob finds himself as little able to evade the man’s gaze as a book
can, of its own volition, evade the scrutiny of a reader.” Yet Jacob, hired as
a scrutinizer of account books turns his talents to discovering the truth by
learning Japanese.
Indeed learning the language becomes key to Jacob’s
solving one of the book’s major puzzles.
Over time Jacob works secretly (afraid he is committing a crime) and
tirelessly to learn the language and translate a secret scroll. By novel’s end, his commonly used
Dutch/Japanese dictionary is known as a DaZuto. When he leaves Dejima – less than a thousand
autumns later but more than his original intended five years, Jacob
leaves reluctantly. He leaves behind that dictionary and another product of this mixed world as well. But in Japan he has nowhere to go, cannot stay, so he
calmly sails on.
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