"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" II

I finished the book late last night, and I've spent the past 12 hours or so mulling over what I want to say about it.  The most interesting thing about "Thousand Autumns" as a reader is that I learned quite a bit about this footnote in Dutch and Japanese history that I was only dimly aware of before.

But, I'm not going to write about that aspect of it.  That's ultimately kind of trivial, because this book does aspire to a higher purpose, and that, in the end, deserves more attention than ooing and aahing at the author's attention to detail.

"Thousand Autumns" seeks to be a member of the august parade of high literature that paradoxically fuses together a fanatical loyalty to historical detail and gritty fact with out and out, well, magic.   Don't mistake me or the author, this is not the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez's amazing One Hundred Years of Solitude, nor is it the philosophically-oriented mysticism of Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle, both of which are semi-historical fictions, but with the magic right, up-front and center.  Nor, even, of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, whose magic is mostly confined to one character, and creeps up on you only slowly as the novel progresses.  No, David Mitchell's magic is seen only fleetingly through the fog of medieval Japan, and it when it does appear on stage, it just winks at you, before disappearing again behind the paper screen.

Nonetheless, it is there, and the need for an author who is otherwise fairly committed to recreating realistically Dejima's (the Dutch island in Nagasaki harbor) twilight and the dawn of the long 19th century* to include these little winks and nudges suggests something important about what we as readers and they as authors want out of the past.  Historical fiction often serves to breathe life into two ancient human convictions.   One, that the past was in some important way better.  Two, today's present is unedifying.  Industry, routine, and technology have conspired to rob life of most of its external unknowability.  The essential wonder of the world has somehow been diminished.  Modern day Alexanders might shed a tear while watching daytime television, reading best-selling self-help books, or talking to practitioners of the latest "trend" from the East.  The chorus chants in its yoga pants that the only meaningful journeys left to us are within.  But! It wasn't always this way...right?

By embracing a story set in the past, we can imagine ourselves in our ideal time of choice, and find ourselves enjoying those first discoveries that the world was still offering in its plenitude to the audacious.  But where does magic fit into this?  Ah, well, the past still presents its own problems.  Modern scholarship has filled out many of the details of not just important events, but also is giving us a richer and richer picture of what it was like for an average person to live at any given point in the past. A writer doing research on his setting will discover that while much is unknown about the past, a surprising amount has already been documented to the point where there is precious little room for that key ingredient of all fiction writers: imagination. So, how then to satisfy the demand for a past where the feeling of an individual's possibility for a true adventure was greater, with this oppressive, insistent record of historical fact?  Magic. 

In the case of "Thousand Autumns", magic is mostly confined to the comings and going of the character known as Abbot Enomoto, who as a character rarely rises above the level of comic book villain.  Actually, come to think of it, there are a lot of shades of Ra's al-Ghul here.  He is a malevolent, politically powerful figure of the shadows who heads a religious order secretly devoted to immortality.  And of course, claims to be immortal himself.  Naturally, he winds up being the book's main antagonist to our Batman Jacob de Zoet. How exactly he purports to achieve this, is one of the book's secrets, but needless to say that it's by no process Francis Bacon would approve of.   While we see one, brief demonstration of his "magic", for the most part, David Mitchell is content to leave unanswered and unexplored whether Enomoto's magic works. 

This sort of half-hearted approach to introducing an element of magical mysticism to the past, even in form of an evil character, is pretty much par for the course of all of the other plot devices.  David Mitchell can't resist throwing in a British attack upon Dejima, a love story, a daring rescue attempt of the story's kidnapped heroine, and a handful of chapters showing Japanese intellectuals meeting to discuss how their country is dangerously lagging the rest of the world.  Much happens, and Clerk de Zoet will leave for the Netherlands with the adventure of a lifetime under his belt, but what, in the end was the point of it all?  The magic of the abbot ultimately amounts to little, the British attack on Dejima peters out just at the point where the British triumph is most assured, and Japan and Dejima plod on.  If there is a coherent message in all of this, I failed to see it.

The shortcoming of this kind of historical fiction is that by unifying those two old convictions, you unwittingly expose a third truth about we people: we want more from the past than it can give us.  It was not enough to recreate the story of the Dutch traders living in Japan during the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars and their stranding in Japan by the bankruptcy of the Dutch East India Company.  Not enough, let's introduce an evil religious character who may or may not be practicing some truly dark magic.  Not enough?  How about moving backwards in time by 8 years the HMS Phaeton's attack on Nagasaki Harbor to add more complication to the plot? This attitude of pumping the past for maximal gratification of present needs is pervasive, from the Tea Party's tricorn hats, to Tarantino's Inglorius Basterds and Django Unchained.  As The Atlantic author Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it:

It was almost as though history was refusing to give me what I wanted. And I have come to believe that right there is the thing--the tension in historical art is so much about what we want from the past and the past actually gives. All the juice lay in abandoning our assumptions, our needs, and donning the mask of a different people with different needs. This is never totally possible--but I have found the effort to be transcendent. It fills you with a feeling that is outside of yourself.

This is pretty much it right on the money for why the narrative of "Thousand Autumns" reaches for glory and falls short.

* The Marxist historian Hobsbawm held that for all intents and purposes, the 19th Century intellectually, economically, and culturally really encompassed the years 1789-1914.  I've always liked this formulation, as it has kind of bowled over the arbitrariness of demarcating the beginning and of centuries in the course of human events.