Beauty and The East

David Mitchell, the mad scientist of story, is back with a novel of old Japan

By Lev Grossman Monday, July 19, 2010
    • Illustration by Lou Beach for TIME

    There is no writer whose books I look forward to with more pure, raw curiosity than David Mitchell. An Englishman who has spent a large part of his adult life in Japan and who currently lives in Ireland, he may be thinking harder about how novels work than any other writer of his generation. Certainly nobody takes questions of form and structure in the novel more seriously than Mitchell. His books seem to issue from some high-energy literary laboratory where exotic narrative configurations are tested and optimized for maximum expressive power.

    Which isn't to say that all his books are good. Mitchell's debut, Ghostwritten , published in 1999, was a glorious global daisy chain of story, but he followed it in 2001 with the loopy disaster Number9Dream . His next novel, Cloud Atlas , consists of six stories in different genres, arranged concentrically in an exquisite mirrored labyrinth that isn't quite worth the effort of solving it. (I realize this opinion puts me at odds with its legions of admirers.) In 2006, Mitchell tacked with Black Swan Green , a warm, comical portrait of a boy growing up in rural England in the 1980s that appears to be devoid of any formal artifice whatsoever — though if you put your ear to the page, you can hear the distant hum of buried high-tension wires forming secret, buzzing connections.

    Mitchell's fifth novel is outwardly almost as conventional, apart from its setting. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet begins in 1799 and takes place mostly on a fascinating little scrap of earth called Dejima, a walled, man-made island in Nagasaki harbor. At that time, Japan was closed to Westerners, but the Dutch East India Co. was permitted to operate a quarantined outpost on Dejima for the purpose of engaging in heavily regulated trade.

    Onto this tiny, fraught planetoid Mitchell places Jacob de Zoet, a young Dutch clerk gone East to earn a fortune and the approval of his fiancée's demanding father. Jacob is a serviceable everyman, by turns timorous and plucky, but even his pluck can't save him from a sudden thunderous infatuation with a Japanese midwife named Orito Aibagawa. Tart and independent, Orito is a ruined beauty: her face is disfigured on one side by a burn scar. She is a student of Dutch medicine, hence her presence on Dejima.

    The list of dramas here is long enough to satisfy even a writer of Mitchell's massive appetites. Courting Orito presents Jacob with obstacles practical, political and linguistic, leaving aside the moral issue of his betrothed back home. He must also figure out how to thrive on Dejima, a hothouse of capitalism and corruption crowded with castaways, conscripts, half-castes and ambitious, unscrupulous Dutchmen. All the while, Jacob, Orito and everyone else on the island must appease the trio of silent, fickle powers that governs them from offstage: the East India Co., the shogun and God.

    This narrative richness is an essential feature of the Mitchellian worldview. In his books, life and language teem with infinite amounts of story, radiating from every human being (and even the occasional monkey). All he can hope to do is skim off a tiny fraction of it and gesture helplessly at the rest.

    Mitchell's acute sensitivity to the world's narrative plenitude is both his strength and his weakness. He is myriad-minded, as Coleridge said of Shakespeare — able to skate from brain to brain at will and appreciate the infinite particularity of each. His eye flicks around every scene, snatching details in an agony of desire and indecision. Traveling in a palanquin, Jacob passes a young prostitute leaning out of an upper window:

    She is idly tickling the hollow of her
    throat with a goose feather. Her body
    cannot be 10 years old, but her eyes
    belong to a much older woman's.

    Mitchell makes you feel as if you could go off with that prostitute, abandoning Jacob and his inappropriate crush, and get just as powerful and satisfying a story as you would have if you'd stayed. And Mitchell is, in some basic human sense, correct. Life's pageant is just that rich.

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