The thousand autumns of Jacob De Zoet By David Mitchell, Sceptre, Rs 595

When the Dutch merchants reach the trading outpost of Dejima, they surrender their books of scripture, their crosses, their past lives. They enter a world enclosed within the portals of the Sea Gate and the Land Gate. Beyond lies the Cloistered Empire of Japan, which the traders are seldom allowed to enter. Locked in the island of Dejima, their names are shaped to the Japanese tongue, they take new wives, they become “Oranda-me”, or the ‘round-eyed’, they drink tea. David Mitchell’s historical novel tells of the encounter between two cultures at the cusp of a new century.

Among those who seek their fortune in the East is Jacob de Zoet, a clerk working for the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or the ‘United East Indian Company’; he arrives in Dejima in 1799. Jacob is to keep accounts for the VOC and help root out the corruption that has crept into it. By the turn of the 19th century, the VOC’s lucrative copper trade with Japan is already dwindling. But the Dutch had also brought with them something far more enduring — the language of trade. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is translated into Japanese. Feudal Japan, with its fiercely guarded traditions, learns the words, “political economy”, the power of credit and the aspirations of a mercantile nation. And Smith is not the only author to be translated. The Dutch ships bring with them hundreds of texts on medicine, astronomy, chemistry and politics — the legacy of the European Enlightenment — to be deciphered, translated and studied by an army of Japanese interpreters and scholars.

Jacob meets the crusty Dr Marinus, who had been a pupil of Carl Linnaeus himself. Disillusioned with his mentor, Marinus sets up a seminary in Dejima, where he teaches medicine and surgery to Japanese students. Indeed, the medical practices of the time form an important part of the narrative, forging connections of gut and bone among its various threads. The novel begins with a complicated childbirth. In the dark, fetid holds of ships, surgeons hack at limbs and improvise smelly concoctions to treat gout. Mercury, used to treat sexually transmitted diseases, becomes an article of trade. In his seminary, Marinus lectures on medicine and demonstrates ways to cure “intessusception”, the unhappy event of “shitting out your own intestines”. The Western discourse of empiricism and rationalism — distilled to the shriek of a patient on an operating table.

The electricity of being at the threshold of change is palpable; Mitchell even has the forward-thinking Marinus quoting from “Kubla Khan” in 1799, about 17 years before the poem was actually published. Nevertheless, it is Marinus’s seminary that brings Aibagawa Orito to Dejima. Orito, who has a face half burned and a fiery spirit, comes to study midwifery there. Inevitably, Jacob falls in love with her, a circumstance that seems to entail some rather trite romantic scenes in the seminary. It also sets in motion a series of fateful events and the story travels from Dejima to a mysterious shrine in the mountains to the streets of Nagasaki.

But apart from Orito and a few others, most of the Japanese characters appear to inhabit a sequence of set pieces, playing Go, reading scrolls, lingering in shrines or indulging in extravagant Oriental cruelty. Occasionally, they break into dramatic and explosive action, but for most of the novel they remain somehow inscrutable, as though stilled in the cool glaze of a painting. Perhaps this is partly deliberate. The novel is often strongly visual in its effect. Herons swoop across its skies, lapwings skim the surface of its waters, characters talk as a dragonfly flits by. They may have been glimpsed from the corner of one’s eye. Familiar motifs laced around the main action, they give the novel the quality of a Japanese painting. There are moments when some of the subjects seem to be watched from a distance. Then again, there are actual drawings that interrupt the text. At times, it seems that Mitchell, in his anxiety to represent, is not taking any chances. The reader is shown exactly what certain faces, places and objects look like. Landscapes and characters in the novel continually waver between this over-representation and a sense of distance.

Mitchell may have used this anxiety about portraying a different culture and its language within the story itself. When the Dutch arrive in Dejima, they are assigned interpreters. The Japanese, while speaking Dutch, often search for the right word. Jacob, who wants to communicate with Orito, gifts her a dictionary. But words emerge transformed in another tongue. The act of translation can be deliberately used to distort the original meaning. The Cloistered Empire, in order to protect itself from foreign influence, imposes barriers to communication. Foreign visitors are not allowed to learn Japanese. Yet, Jacob slowly learns the language in his years in Dejima.

It is perhaps his desire to know and understand this mysterious culture that keeps Jacob in Dejima, until he wishes his skin were burnished gold, his red hair straight and black, and his eyes no longer ‘round’. Jacob wants to slip into the skin of the land itself. When all other stories and characters melt away, it is Jacob de Zoet’s experience that continues to haunt. The quiet, young clerk from Domburg arrives at the shores of a foreign land armed with a battered psalter and memories of a fiancée at home. Isolated from the corrupt employees of the VOC, he responds to this new land very differently from them. Like the Ulyssean wanderer, Jacob is changed by what he sees, and Japan, the “Land of a Thousand Autumns”, becomes a part of him. It is as if he is locked in an eternity on the island of Dejima. While Jacob is away, the fortunes of the VOC are reversed and Europe is plunged into wars that will change its map for good. In Japan itself, the British arrive to challenge Dutch trading rights. But the rest, as they say, is history.