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David Mitchell

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel Paperback – March 8, 2011

by David Mitchell (Author)

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By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas | Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize

The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, and costly courtesans comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout 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 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 of which will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings.

Print length

492 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Random House Trade Paperbacks
Publication date

March 8, 2011
Dimensions

5.5 x 1.14 x 8.16 inches
ISBN-10

0812976363
ISBN-13

978-0812976366
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Popular Highlights in this book

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“The soul is a verb.” He impales a lit candle on a spike. “Not a noun.”
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‘Our friends show us what we can do; our enemies teach us what we must do.’
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“The truth of a myth, Your Honor, is not its words but its patterns.”
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A page-turner . . . [David] Mitchell’s masterpiece; and also, I am convinced, a masterpiece of our time.”—Richard Eder, The Boston Globe

“An achingly romantic story of forbidden love . . . Mitchell’s incredible prose is on stunning display. . . . A novel of ideas, of longing, of good and evil and those who fall somewhere in between [that] confirms Mitchell as one of the more fascinating and fearless writers alive.”—Dave Eggers, The New York Times Book Review

“The novelist who’s been showing us the future of fiction has published a classic, old-fashioned tale . . . an epic of sacrificial love, clashing civilizations and enemies who won’t rest until whole family lines have been snuffed out.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“By any standards, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a formidable marvel.”—James Wood, The New Yorker

“A beautiful novel, full of life and authenticity, atmosphere and characters that breathe.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR

About the Author

David Mitchell is the award-winning and bestselling author of The Bone Clocks, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Black Swan Green, Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream, and Ghostwritten. Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Mitchell was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time in 2007. With KA Yoshida, Mitchell translated from the Japanese the internationally bestselling memoir The Reason I Jump. He lives in Ireland with his wife and two children.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (March 8, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 492 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0812976363
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812976366
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.14 x 8.16 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #55,065 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,456 in Historical Romances
- #5,356 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- #7,959 in Historical Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
1,616 ratings

About the author

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David Mitchell

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Born in 1969, David Mitchell grew up in Worcestershire. After graduating from Kent University, he taught English in Japan, where he wrote his first novel, GHOSTWRITTEN. Published in 1999, it was awarded the Mail on Sunday John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, NUMBER9DREAM, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and in 2003, David Mitchell was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. His third novel, CLOUD ATLAS, was shortlisted for six awards including the Man Booker Prize, and adapted for film in 2012. It was followed by BLACK SWAN GREEN, shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year Award, and THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET, which was a No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller, and THE BONE CLOCKS which won the World Fantasy Best Novel Award. All three were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. David Mitchell’s seventh novel is SLADE HOUSE (Sceptre, 2015).

In 2013, THE REASON I JUMP: ONE BOY'S VOICE FROM THE SILENCE OF AUTISM by Naoki Higashida was published by Sceptre in a translation from the Japanese by David Mitchell and KA Yoshida and became a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. Its successor, FALL DOWN SEVEN TIMES, GET UP EIGHT: A YOUNG MAN’S VOICE FROM THE SILENCE OF AUTISM, was published in 2017, and was also a Sunday Times bestseller.

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5 star		64%
4 star		22%
3 star		9%
2 star		2%
1 star		3%

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Top reviews from the United States

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bcbeads

Brilliant. Beautifully written. Well researched. A rare gem of an historical novel. 10 stars!

Reviewed in the United States on March 28, 2017

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Fascinating story. Brilliantly written. The "some sexual content" is written in obscure, sometime poetic, sometimes bored, no big deal language that is, in fact, not at all explicit. But you can figure it out, so I cannot say there is no sexual content. Plus one thread of the story follows a corrupt and sinister sexual cult run out of a shrine whose patron is the most powerful and dangerous Japanese official in the area. However, I would have given this book to my clever voraciously reading son, had it been around when he was 12 years old.

I could hardly put this novel down. I wanted the pleasure of reading it never to stop. I kept backtracking, rereading passages and whole chapters just for the delight of the language. I laughed out loud, and I cried. It is a very complicated story, populated by assorted con artists, ugly Dutch trading company exploiters of whatever they can find to exploit, whose racial attitudes are those of the 1700s. And the Japanese are no better, except that is it their country they are trying to protect from being overtaken by outsiders. Japanese society was extremely rigid, with horrible tortures and punishments for all kinds of apparently slight infractions. But then the Dutch at that time were brutal in their quest to grab chunks of "empire" away from England and Spain. Japan was one of the few places where the people being exploited for trade managed to contain the foreign invaders, and made the trading company follow their rules. (While in the same time period, England and Spain were imposing their systems of law, religion, and culture on their subjugated colonies, with not much care for what the locals thought or wanted.)

So in this time and place a young Dutch clerk, nephew of a protestant minister, has signed on with the Dutch Trading Company V.O.C. to make his fortune with a five year contract and return to Holland with enough money to win the heart of his future father-in-law, and be married to the girl he adores. We meet all the characters he has to live, work, and get along with, Dutch and Japanese, some earnest and fair, some merely greedy bastards, and some pure evil. He has to learn the language, keep his balance on the Company's tightrope while juggling the spoken and unspoken rules of both the the Company's and the Japanese officials' games.

This group of outsiders is contained on a small trading island of warehouses, offices, and rooming houses for the officials of the Company, with only the Company men and their slaves and servants (and local bar girls) for social interaction. They are restricted from entering Japan proper. Their interactions with the Japanese are limited to formal business, translations, accounts, stock inventories, negotiating contracts for sales of various commodities, and trials and punishments for those caught breaking the many strict and arbitrary Japanese laws. This is no kind of a "junket," nor is it a particularly posh posting. Exotic yes, but most of young Jacob's co-workers lack the imagination to appreciate their environment as anything other than something to be endured, with the dream of wealth at the end of their term. Jacob does appreciate his surroundings, applies himself to learning Japanese, treats people fairly and with respect, but he gets in trouble because he is honest, and refuses to wink at his superior's fraudulent schemes to enrich themselves.

The ending is not at all what I expected. I do not want to give anything away. It is both happier and sadder than I thought it might be. But it is a realistic and very satisfying end to a remarkable story. I have some Dutch ancestors, who in the 17th century went west, and ultimately ended up in one of England's colonies in North America. This book helps me imagine what their lives might have been, had they decided to sign on to a Dutch East Asia Company contract instead.

50 people found this helpful

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M

I thought this book was a waste of my time and money.

Reviewed in the United States on June 30, 2021

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Since I am a Japan scholar I felt the need to read this book because people ask me about it. Simply put, I could not stop putting it down. You read that correctly. It was simply a drag to finish this as I kept wanting to stop reading it. I find it sad that the dysfunctional current “fashion” in fiction writing is nothing more than a fascination with the grotesque and disturbing somehow misrepresented as some form of profundity. Does it capture a sense of life in Dejima centuries ago? You are better off with a nonfiction account. There are many. I would skip the sordid focus on the creepy and weird found in this pointlessly disturbing train wreck. I was so happy to finish this. Could not throw it in the garbage fast enough.

18 people found this helpful

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Sean Farrell

Another masterpiece by David Mitchell.

Reviewed in the United States on October 2, 2017

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David Mitchell is a genius. Each of his books is distinctly his own, but also different from the others. Many of his books can be radically different from part to part within themselves. This particular novel is more of a self-contained story than other works of Mr. Mitchell's I've read, but even it has 3 very distinct plotlines occurring. The primary narrative focuses on the titular Jacob De Zoet, who has been sent to a Dutch trade outpost in 1800's Japan to look for evidence of graft being perpetrated by the previous Chief Resident. While there, he quickly makes enemies of those who benefited from the old way of doing things, but makes friends with an eccentric doctor and several Nagasaki locals. Things don't go as he, or anyone, really anticipates as we see loves won and lost, battles fought, corruption exposed, and a shocking secret society brought to light. The characters are well drawn and the story compelling, all adding up to a world you'll want to savor. As with his other novels I enjoyed this one immensely and look forward to reading again in the future, especially as the interconnected nature of his works is brought increasingly to light.

21 people found this helpful

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BLR

Fascinating Subject - Not An Easy Read

Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2020

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My book group selected this, which is how I came to read it. I found the subject and the writing fascinating - clash of early 19th century cultures between the Dutch, English and Japanese in Japan - and yet how similar power is expressed in disparate cultures: greed, hierarchy, extreme cruelty toward and subjugation of women and people of color and lower class, etc. It is historical fiction but the second part of the book also felt like mythology/fantasy.It's not all grim, but only a few characters are really honorable. It is not a surprise then that the author's other books are mostly science fiction and fantasy. Most people found it hard to read; I loved the language and intricacy of the story - very much like an actual 19th century British novel (Dickens, Eliot, etc.)

7 people found this helpful

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The Amazon J

one of my all time favourites

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 12, 2019

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Have read this book at least 3 times now, and it never lets me down. Meticulously researched - including a toe curling description of a contemporary medical procedure that makes me feel more ill than most horror movie scenes. We journey with Jacob, meeting a rogue's gallery of unsavoury and profiteering merchants and sailors, for whom Jacob's sense of honour is either an affront or an opportunity. The book is shot through with subtle humour - for example, Jacob is only on this (5 year) trip because his girlfriend's father sent him off to find his fortune before permitting marriage. Naive Jacob accepts this unquestioningly.
It's also a horror story, with the monstrous Abbot Enomoto looming like Conrad's Kurtz over the destinies of all that we will meet. This part of the novel also links - strongly - to The Bone Clocks, Mitchell's next novel, so if you have read that and ignored this - don't. All of Mitchell's novels are loosely linked by characters, but The Bone Clocks also adds a level to the supernatural elements of this story, which I had originally read as an unbalanced religious cult.
So a historical novel, a horror story - but of course, also a love story as Jacob crosses paths with Orito, a Japanese nurse of the Dutch Doctor Marinus. To say much more on this would ruin the twists, but it is through Orito we discover the true depths of Emoto's depravity. David Mitchell writes superb books, but this still stands as his best for me.

13 people found this helpful

KTB

One of the best books I've read this year

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 26, 2018

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What a wonderful novel, and such an unusual setting with all the fascinating cultural contrasts and historical background. Memorable and well-drawn characters weave in and out of a superb plot that follows many strands from different viewpoints, and I was hooked from the first to the last page. The final scene in particular is very poignant. A book I definitely didn't want to end, and my absolute favorite David Mitchell work so far. Highly recommended.

10 people found this helpful

C.Fryett

In a class of it's own.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 11, 2019

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This was the first David Mitchell book I read. I am now awaiting the release of his latest, having read all the others. David Mitchell is the most amazing writer, he has the ability to understand things about the human experience that he himself cannot have experienced. So, everything is very authentic and you are taken to another world. I feel very envious of anyone who still have books of his to read.

5 people found this helpful

MS A BIRKS

Excellent book but long

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 1, 2020

Verified Purchase

Bought for book group read. I had read this when it was released so purchased second hand, and it was in good condition. Great read - loved it as much second time as first. Jacob goes to work for Dutch company on island off Japan in 17 something. A good representation of life in Japan at that time, although I found the hierarchy of Japanese society somewhat confusing. Seemed to end very quickly and epilogue crammed a ot into a few pages, which was a bit disappointing. David Mitchell is such a versatile author - this is nothing like any of his other books, but wellworth a read.

2 people found this helpful

Halbarad

I haven't enjoyed a novel so much for years

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 25, 2015

Verified Purchase

I haven't enjoyed a novel so much for years. Sent to the Dutch trading post, Dejima, in Shogunate Japan at the end of the 18th century, the protagonist is a naive but clever young Dutchman whose task is to clear up the accounts of the Dutch East India Company. It is the day to day business of the trading post, and its odd relationship with the Japanese government and officialdom which takes up the first part of the book. Full of crude, bawdy. and often very funny back stories of the other exiles and the irascible, challenging presence of Dr. Marinus, young Jacob de Zoet is on a very steep learning curve about the dark side of humanity. He also falls in love....and the book turns stranger and far more menacing. Without giving anything away, de Zoet's love interest take centre stage in a tale involving a sinister monastery and the dark secret of its Abbot.
The ending of the book is beautifully written and heartbreakingly poignant.

12 people found this helpful

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