Ink, drunk by thirsty wood, dripping between cracks...
Ink, thinks Jacob, you most fecund of liquids..."
Amen to that. I had a gift for spilling ink on myself in high school, and I still remember being amazed how it always just seemed to seep into every stitch of clothing I had.
All right, I'm about 100 pages into "Thousand Autumns", and so far? Well, I'll give my ramblings in a second, but here's a rather loose plot summary:
Set in 1799 in the Japanese city of Nagasaki (yes, that Nagasaki), the book opens with an absolutely arresting chapter on the labor of the Japanese magistrate's wife. The birth is very complicated*, and Ms. Aibagawa, a Japanese midwife whose been trained in some Dutch methods of delivery, finally intervenes to help. David Mitchell does a fantastic job here of creating intense suspense and it was one of the most vivid and gripping descriptions of the process of childbirth I've ever read.
That first chapter acts sort of like a prologue, for we now switch to Jacob de Zoet as our point of view from here on out. He arrives in Nagasaki with twinned purposes. One, his official duty, which is to untangle the messes left behind by previous administrators of the Dutch trading post in Nagasaki (called Dejima), and secondly, to use his five year assignment with the Dutch East India Company (VOC - its Dutch abbreviation from here on out) to make a fortune. He has a fiancée at home back in Holland, and her father is not too keen on the notion of giving away his daughter to a poor, if otherwise respectable, young man. The first 100 pages are mostly written to give a flavor of what's awaiting Jacob (lots of palace intrigue among the officers of the VOC, disrespect from the motley crew of the lower ranks of the VOC, and tense political interactions with slippery Japanese potentates). Jacob meets the alluring Ms Aibagawa when she stumbles into a warehouse he's working in, chasing an ape who has stolen an amputated leg. He tries to help her out, is charmed by her, and finds himself wrestling with a fascination for her wholly unbecoming of a man who is supposed to be diligently making a name for himself for his beloved.
The key plot that seems to be taking shape runs like so: The VOC is slouching its way towards bankruptcy, but due to the chaos of the Napoleonic Wars, few people outside the company have cottoned on. In the VOC's global trade constellation, Dejima's purpose is to secure Japanese copper. Japanese copper is shipped to Batavia (today, Jakarta), which is the brightest star in the company's universe. The buckle of its Orion's belt, if you will. The copper is used to make coins to pay the native armies that defend Dutch interests in the East Indies. No copper, no payment. No payment, no armies No armies, will lead to, well, "plunder, rapine", and the like. Vorstenbosch has issued an ultimatum to the Japanese shogun to either increase the amount of copper by something like a magnitude of 10(!), or the Dutch will shut down Dejima, thus closing Japan's only window to the world. Drama now begins to ensue.
Plot now duly summarized, my impressions so far are mixed. The author is David Mitchell, (in)famous(?) for being the mind behind Cloud Atlas. Whether you hated or loved the movie, everyone who saw it seemed to agree that it was an unique experience. So far, any hopes I've had that the book would be unconventional in any big way have been largely disappointed. The characters are largely standard-issue, mass-production people:
1.) Jacob de Zoet - Our quiet, unassuming hero fit to bursting with integrity.
2.) Chief Vorstenbosch - Brash, ambitious, ethically slippery boss of former. Also condescending towards natives, to boot.
3.) Ms. Aibagawa - Exotic, intelligent, slightly deformed foreign beauty. Potential love interest for white hero?
4.) Grote - Weasley white guy trying to make a few bucks in the Nagasaki black market. The name is Dutch, but the whole persona screams Cockney. I await the sentence he addresses Jacob as "gov'neh".
5.) Ogawa - Japanese translator interested in Western ideas. Also quiet, unassuming, and like our Western hero, fit to bursting with integrity. Seems like David Mitchell's factory for "good" men only had one molding.
6.) Fischer - Senior clerk envious (and anxious) about Jacob's new powers and assigned role as investigator of the company's books. Kind of priggish, which means of course that his nationality is Prussian (read: German).
The set pieces, too, also feel somewhat lazy. A key scene towards the end of my reading has one of the official Japanese interpreters, Kobayashi, coming back to meet with Vorstenbosch, Jacob, and a few other officers of the VOC. He reads the shogun's reply, which mentions nothing about the copper, but instead politely requests (demands) a gift of one thousand peacock feathers. Jacob, that wily, industrious company employee that he is, catches Kobayashi in a deliberate mistranslation, trapping Kobayashi into showing that he deliberately misrepresented the word for "one hundred" as "one thousand", in the hopes of swindling the Dutch out of the other nine hundred. The purpose of all of this seems to be to underscore that Jacob is loyal and smart and that some of the Japanese are greedy and untrustworthy. However, it all has a feeling of being too cute by half, in that you can almost feel the author's need to prove the point more than be faithful to the true thinking and motivations of his own characters. So he has the ostensibly Kobayashi wander into a trap set up by Jacob, that even a less bright person would simply avoid by obfuscating.
After all, aren't diplomatic translators supposed to be good at that? Dictators of the world: if your translators can't filibuster their way out of getting caught in their own scams, execute the old guy and find a new one. If you feel like you've seen this kind of set piece before of the wily hero secretly using knowledge of the native language to smoke out a better deal, you have. See: Daenerys Targaryen outfoxing the slavers in A Storm of Swords, for a good one. Readers, got any other classic examples? I'm pressed on time before I go to class.
Criticisms aside, this book rises above these sort of rote structures by being absolutely rich in every other respect. The language is often a joy to read. The rhythms and the idioms of that epoch express themselves in ways that are unsuspecting and fun. For example, Jacob meets with the curmudgeonly company doctor, Marinus, and after facing a demeaning assault of scorn and irascibility on his place of origin, Jacob replies that as he and the doctor will be neighbors, he hopes that his presence will raise his esteem of Zeelanders, the province in the Netherlands Jacob hails from. The doctor curtly replies:
"'So propinquity propagates neighborliness, does it?'"Ok, I admit it, that tickled me.
Also thoroughly enjoyable is the breadth of historical detail. David Mitchell places his story four-square and center in the midst of one of the most turbulent events in human history: the upheaval of the Napoleonic wars. The fact that the story is taking place in a relatively remote island of calm makes it no less compelling, as there is a sense that it cannot remain so sedate for long. On a more granular level, little things like the smell of Chinese fireworks, the sight of dead dogs in the harbor, and the texture of the coffee make it all the more fun to read. These serve, as a reader, to make me appreciate the exoticism of Shogunate Japan. The Dutch were not permitted to leave their trading post except for very special circumstances, so you only get little glimpses of what lies across the bridge to Nagasaki proper, and the mystery only adds to the allure of Old Japan that David Mitchell is painting for me.
All right readers, that was a bit of a long start to my segment on this book. Now that I've laid out some of the groundwork of what's in it, future updates will be somewhat shorter.
* It even comes with a diagram!
