52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
62. The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet.
The much anticipated new novel from Mitchell, whose Cloud atlas I recently re-read. A meticulously structured novel about borders, both physical and cultural, and about good and evil. de Zoet is a Dutch clerk, laboring on Dejima, the tiny artificial island maintained outside Nagasaki for the purpose of keeping trade routes open and foreigners off the Shogun’s soil. His story comprises most of the first part of the novel, and we’re given a thorough introduction to his character, what he will and will not do, so that we can assess his moral response to challenges that test his conscience. The middle part of the novel moves deep into Japan, to an ancient monastery with hints of sinister goings-on, where a midwife of Jacob’s fancy from earlier in the novel has been taken hostage. She, too, is forced to make a difficult choice of conscience in the face of evil, and we begin to see what conscience in cultural context looks like. Questions arise: is there a common morality? Or do moral decisions depend on cultural realities? The third and final section returns to Dejima, where a blended culture must choose how to deal with the threat of yet a third outsider.
I found it wildly interesting to be revisiting, in fiction, the world that I first visited in Endo’s Silence, the feudal Japan that has outlawed Christianity and all foreigners. That novel was set some years earlier than this, but a significant chapter in Thousand autumns nods to Endo’s Japan, depicting the ritual trampling of the fumie while wrestling with very similar moral questions. Also, Mitchell is a master of voices and styles, and this novel leaps from historical fiction to romance to sci-fi to horror to poetry, taking a cunning and often brilliant stab at all of them. I plan to read it again, possibly within the next few months, to get a better feel for it.
