The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

What I appreciate most about David Mitchell’s novel is how he grounds the history in scenes full of well-developed characters. So, for example, we don’t begin the novel with a long note about the historical period or the lineage of the ruling class, but rather with the urgency of childbirth gone wrong in the house of a concubine in Nagasaki in 1799.

It’s from this rootedness in the sense-based that we move into a wider exploration of both geopolitics and the magical, which I absolutely fell in love with—this sense that there is an element of the supernatural at play… show more.

Sometimes, we just need an escape. This fiction book takes place in the Dutch trading post of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, Japan. The novel follows the story of Jacob de Zoet, a young and honest Dutch clerk seeking to make his fortune and return to the Netherlands to marry his fiancée.

It’s a fun, escapist read that appeals to founders and builders like me. We follow this self-made hero who is drawn into a complex world he is forced to confront. It’s a journey of personal growth and morality set against a fascinating historical backdrop.

While, of course, as a fiction book, it gets a bit fantastical at times, this book captures the true oddity and tension of the end of Japan’s sakoku era, when the country was cut off from the world, except for a few highly controlled ports like Dejima in Nagasaki.

I loved how well the author expressed the feeling of time and place and laughed at how some things still haven’t changed. 

David Mitchell’s most famous novels, Cloud Atlas, and The Bone Clocks, are incredible works of fabulist fiction, but The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is my favorite. Mitchell’s prose is stunning, and it particularly shines in this novel.

His characters, both European and Japanese, grab the reader immediately and are some of the most human, heartbreaking people I’ve met in a novel. Here, the uncanny, fantastical, and speculative elements are more subtle in telling the story of an unlikely relationship between a Dutchman and a Japanese woman during the height of the Dutch East Indies Company’s influence… show more.

David Mitchell's fantasia of life in the closed world of Edo Japan is a visceral, eerie, and profound novel that's also great fun, and it has everything: love, honor, treachery, bureaucracy, magic, a terrifying cult, a debauched ape, and the delightfully arch proto-scientist Dr. Marinus. As with many of his novels, it has the feel and richness of great cinema, and his depiction of life on an island in Nagasaki harbor where representatives of the Dutch East India Company are permitted to trade with a secretive nation they barely understand is so well-researched that you'll almost believe it happened.  

Mitchell is one of the greatest living English novelists, a virtuoso prose stylist and compelling explorer of ideas. He has often written about Japan, where he once lived. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet evokes a very curious place and time in Japanese history, the late eighteenth century, when the country was mostly closed to the world, apart from Dejima, a tiny man-made island in Nagasaki harbour which served as a quarantined Dutch trading post. I could also add another of his books set in contemporary Japan, ‘number9dream’ - a vivid, violent quest set in the Tokyo underworld.