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

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    But Mitchell is constantly in danger of being overwhelmed by that richness. He struggles to discipline his imagination, to tear his eyes away from the hollow of that 10-year-old prostitute's throat so that he can get on with the story. Early on in Thousand Autumns , Jacob gets his nose broken in a shipboard scuffle. Afterward, he thinks he's covered in blood, but it turns out to be ink:

    Ink, from his cracked ink-pot, indigo
    rivulets and dribbling deltas ...
    Ink, drunk by thirsty wood, dripping
    between cracks ...
    Ink, thinks Jacob, you most fecund of
    liquids ...

    One eyes that last sentence nervously. Ink may be fecund, but the reader's patience is finite. The writer who sees universes in a drop of ink is not a writer who can be relied on to know when to shut up. You want to reassure Mitchell that sometimes it's O.K. to be just a little fecund.

    In Thousand Autumns , Mitchell does keep control, barely (there's a late, ill-judged lapse into rhyming prose). This book will not bore you. Jacob and Orito manage only a few brief, intense encounters before she is spirited away to a mountain convent by an evil nobleman whose wrath Jacob has incurred. The convent turns out to harbor a horrifying secret. Orito must be extracted from it at all costs.

    There's a melodramatic quality to the romance of Jacob and Orito. It's not quite as real as the world it takes place in. Jacob is plagued by an inner blankness that is not uncommon in clever young men in novels — you see it in Haruki Murakami's work — but is all the more noticeable when compared with the glorious detail around him. He falls in love with Orito with a swiftness and tenacity that the reader never quite manages to be convinced by. He lusts after Orito, misses her and worries about her safety; he broods over his own prospects and occasionally exhibits a pleasing resourcefulness. But that's all. His mind feels curiously uninhabited. This blankness afflicts Mitchell's heroes more than it does his other characters — the farther his characters are from the center of the action, the more human they are. That 10-year-old courtesan feels more real than the Dutch clerk who eyes her from his palanquin.

    But if the setup is melodrama, the payoff is pure Mitchell. He has a fondness for palindromes — losing at cards, a man says, "Judas damn you ... you damn Ju das" — and he gives Thousand Autumns a wonderfully melancholy palindromic quality, in the sense that it continually delivers the mirror image of what you're expecting. Jacob makes an oath and then immediately breaks it. He loses when he's sure he's winning and wins after he thinks all is lost. Rescues go awry. Connections are missed. In a late, bravura sequence, an English warship arrives to menace Dejima, and the captain, whose career hangs in the balance, tells himself firmly (while looking, not coincidentally, into a mirror), "We shall reverse our reverses." It's a key phrase: later, Mitchell gives it to a man playing Go and still later to a man who is staring down that English warship's cannons.

    Strangely, it's at exactly such moments, when Mitchell's ordering hand is most strongly present, that one feels the terrifying randomness — the structurelessness — of life most keenly. "If only," the Go player reflects, "this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders." Those slippages and blunders are Mitchell's real subject. They're also what drives his relentless search for new narrative architectures. How do you tell the story of how things fall apart in the form of a story that does not itself fall apart? There's no answer, and a thousand answers. It's the inexhaustibly fecund paradox behind all of Mitchell's novels: he is a writer who uses order to depict chaos.

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