The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Japan. I keep checking the news to see whether or not nuclear catastrophe has occurred yet. Japan has been on my mind a lot in the past few days, as I have been reading David Mitchell’s book “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet”. It’s a wonderful book, a love story, an adventurous thriller, and a meditation on culture clash in the late 18^th century. Japan at this time was almost entirely closed to foreign influence, but limited trading with the Dutch East India Company was allowed as long as the foreigners, mostly Dutch, confined themselves to the artificial island of Dejima, near Nagasaki.  The hero Jacob de Zoet is an honest Dutch accountant brought to Dejima to help root out corruption. Along the way, Orito Aibagawa, a highly skilled but scarred midwife, literally barges into his life during a hilarious episode when she is chasing a thieving monkey that has made off with a corpse’s leg. This is a 500 page novel that draws you into a meticulously re-created lost world. There is a full cast of foreign and Japanese characters, including the sympathetic interpreter Uzaemon and the initially prickly, but good-hearted Dr. Marinus. Unbeknownst to everybody, the eery Lord Abbot Enomoto has sinister plans to kidnap Orito for dark rituals at his mysterious mountaintop shrine, rituals so evil that the monks and nuns have to be kept drugged to…well, read it and find out!