thousand autumns

I put the novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet on my read list because of other books I've read by the author David Mitchell. Mitchell writes on that wobbly line between--or maybe its the smeary overlap in the Venn diagram--of science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy. Maybe David Mitchell would hate that description, I don't know. I guess he could describe it better himself, and perhaps has, elsewhere. What I do know is that Mitchell seems to have a fascination with time, and how we, as humans (and perhaps other human-adjacent creatures) move through it.

This novel seems to fall more squarely into the historical fiction genre, but I wasn't too far in before I began to get a sense of time as a character in this story. de Zoet is a carefully told story, of Europeans in c. 1800 Japan, where they were not welcome, and were mostly segregated from the populace to prevent European influence in the general culture. The pacing of the story recalls that attachment to history, tradition, and sameness the leaders of Japan held dear tat the time. Jacob de Zoet himself is a classic reluctant hero, in the form of a mid-level clerk who see himself as an uphold of what is righteous and true, which is mostly expressed in his manners and dignity, until he is called upon to uphold those ideals in a more taxing sense.

Mitchell thumbs his nose at the demand for fast paced, action drama and paints a picture of 'modern' Europeans, doing their best to take advantage of the closed Japanese culture, while the Japanese did the same from their point of view, all the while both looking at the other as the barbarian. Mitchell uses this backdrop to explore the relationships between the very few people on either side of this cultural divide who saw one another as human, with similar feelings, thoughts, and goals, and who reached across this divide toward one another, while early geopolitics tried to hold them back.

There is a whole chapter where Mitchell gives himself up to the poetry of what he is doing. Its like a treasure or a hidden message for us in the midst of of this love letter to an earlier time, which tries to express how different we are, and how much the same.