Revisiting Dejima (Japan): From Recollections to Fiction in David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)

In the Edo period, all the missionaries from the capital used to “summer” up here, to escape from the heat. I suppose we have the missionaries to thank for naming these mountains “the Japan Alps.” Why do people always have to compare things with abroad? (Like Kagoshima, the Naples of Japan, that always set my teeth on edge.) Nobody knows what the locals used to call the mountains before anyone knew the Alps, or even Europe, was out there. (Am I the only one who thinks this is depressing?)

(Mitchell, Number9dream 250)

This excerpt from a letter sent by Eiji, a Japanese teenager, to his mentally ill mother in Mitchell’s second novel, Number9dream (2001), already addressed the issue of cross exchanges between the West and the East. Though staged as an aside and embedded in a failed attempt at communication, it remains seminal in the history of Mitchell’s subtle treatment of cross-cultural issues, a recurring topic in his “house of fiction.” The passage showcases the violence hidden in the process of naming by contrasting the logic inherent to comparison – reducing the uncanny character of foreign elements while preserving their exotic appeal – and the illegitimacy of such an attitude. It is tempting to read this text through the lenses of post-colonial literature, since it does indeed call up ironical distanciation, because it reverses the Western point of view by adopting that of a Japanese native, and because it plays on this urge to recover a lost state of language.

Mitchell’s body of fictional work has elicited a continued interest in how cultures and history affect language and cross-cultural relations: in Cloud Atlas (2004), the very structure of the novel is based on a reappraisal through time and place of several documents, texts or scores; in Black Swan Green (2006) he revisits the culture of small town England in the eighties with maniacal documentary attention to details and discourse; in Number9dream he embeds the diary of a Second World War kamikaze in a modern teen/sci-fi narrative. Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) follows the same track insofar as its fiction is based on extended research into historical facts, a number of sources being quoted in the Acknowledgments section.¹ The novel comes as a paradoxical travel narrative/biography in which the hero, a Dutch customs and trade officer, is stuck on the island of Dejima at the gates of then forbidden Japan for eighteen years. Mitchell’s literary tour de force this time is to transform such a claustrophobic and dreary situation into a riveting tale of impossible romance, daring chivalric feats and political fights, with the thrill of the suspense novel, a whiff of the Enlightenment’s encyclopaedic enterprise and some insights into the fairly messy beginnings of Western empires.

Uncovering the sources: a novel with a history

One of the keys to the novel’s particular mix of fiction and history is the autobiography of Hendrik Doeff. Doeff (Amsterdam 1777 – Amsterdam 1835) became a buyer for the Dutch United East India Company in 1798 and was send immediately to Dejima, the artificial island opposite Nagasaki serving as the only trading post and gateway to Japan, where he arrived in July 1799 as a clerk. The Napoleonic wars and the general mayhem in Europe left him stranded there as Chief of the Dutch for eighteen years, going for months, sometimes years, without news from Europe while the political fortunes of the Netherlands varied. There he had to face various attempts by the Russians and the British to undermine Dutch monopoly on trade with Japan, but he held fast and became a scholar of Japanese.

Though primarily intended for a Dutch audience when it was first published in Haarlem in 1833, Recollections of Japan was soon to be translated into Japanese, and has been re-published regularly over the years. From the start, then, this book deviated from the usual path of colonial literature, as it was circulated widely in Japan.² It also served...