FICTION IN REVIEW

1 8 3 R F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W C A L E B S M I T H The di≈cult birth of a concubine’s baby, the drumhead trial of a corrupt o≈cer, the smuggling of a psalter into the Cloistered Empire – with these three scenes, David Mitchell begins The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, an elaborately, sometimes splendidly envisioned historical novel. Set in Japan at the turn of the nineteenth century, a distant but recognizable phase of globalization , the book is preoccupied with the opening up of closed spheres. ‘‘Land naturally divides itself into nations,’’ a ship’s captain says to himself in a moment of reflection, but ‘‘the seas dissolve human boundaries.’’ When a midwife trained in European medicine resorts to a pair of forceps, a Japanese servant is scandalized by the ‘‘foreign contraption,’’ but the operation saves the lives of the mother and the child. When the chief of a Dutch East India Company factory is found guilty of corruption, he lashes out at his judges, drawing blood; the trial looks more and more like an arbitrary exercise of power, and the line between legitimate business and enterprising fraud becomes unstable. When a pious clerk T h e T h o u s a n d A u t u m n s o f J a c o b d e Z o e t , by David Mitchell (Random House, 496 pp., $26) 1 8 4 S M I T H Y brings the Psalms of David into a nation that has outlawed Christian books, he is anxious that the authorities will detect his crime – but the interpreter who inspects his luggage is more interested, it turns out, in a copy of The Wealth of Nations. Every attempt to draw a border, to enforce a discipline, seems to be doomed. Knowledge is going to circulate. Bodies are bound to transgress. Wealth will flow. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is composed of three interlocking stories. In the first, Jacob arrives in Dejima, a tiny artificial island o√ the coast of Japan, and does his best to get the Dutch East India Company’s books in order. It is a delicate, thankless job. The corruption in the company runs deep. The clerk’s sti√ sobriety makes him an oddity on Dejima; he finds himself surrounded by swindlers and hustlers, struggling to decipher the codes of their down-and-out cosmopolitanism. Even his superior o≈cers may be more concerned with their own fortunes than with the a√airs of the company. To make matters worse, foreigners in Dejima work under the suspicious eye of the shogun’s regime. Japan wants the profits of international trade, but it also aims to keep Western culture from contaminating ‘‘the most reclusive empire in the modern world.’’ The practice of Christianity is a serious crime. The Dutch are not permitted to study the Japanese language, and contact with local civilians is discouraged. Any servant or interpreter may be a spy. Dejima is a trading post, but it is also a quarantine. Jacob is no romantic hero. A humble pastor’s nephew and a scrupulous bureaucrat, he tries hard to keep his conscience clean. He lives by a clerk’s morality. ‘‘The world would be happier without slavery’’ is one of his platitudes. Soon he finds himself becoming enchanted with Aibagawa Orito, the midwife who saved a magistrate’s infant son and who, in return, has been granted permission to study under a Dutch scholar-surgeon on Dejima. Smart and elegant, made even more intriguing by a severe burn on one side of her face, Orito begins to appear in Jacob’s dreams. His middle-class ethics, cultivated in the pews of his uncle’s Dutch Reformed Church, don’t exactly interfere with his desire; they give it meaning, a sense of responsibility. He imagines himself as the protector of an exotic, damaged creature. He is willing to F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W 1 8 5 R hazard his career to keep himself untainted...