The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

This utterly original and wildly satisfying new novel gets such a dazzling performance here that you are torn between wanting to know how it ends and hoping it never does. On the cusp of the nineteenth century, Jacob de Zoet--hoping to earn enough to marry his sweetheart in Zeeland--arrives on the island off Nagasaki where the shogun sequesters the trading partners of a closed and essentially medieval Japan. In the ensuing symphony of clashing cultures, Jonathan Aris plays all the instruments--from the comic/despicable Dutch and English adventurers to the smoothly confusing Japanese voices. His timbre and range are truly remarkable, his pacing irresistible. Paula Wilcox is equally good in the smaller women's world of the fascinating midwife, Orito Aibagawa. An embarrassment of riches. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Starred review from April 12, 2010
Mitchell’s rightly been hailed as a virtuoso genius for his genre-bending, fiercely intelligent novels Ghostwritten
and Cloud Atlas
. Now he takes something of a busman’s holiday with this majestic historical romance set in turn-of-the-19th-century Japan, where young, naïve Jacob de Zoet arrives on the small manmade island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor as part of a contingent of Dutch East Indies officials charged with cleaning up the trading station’s entrenched culture of corruption. Though engaged to be married in the Netherlands, he quickly falls in hopeless love with Orito Aibagawa, a Dutch-trained Japanese midwife and promising student of Marinus, the station’s resident physician. Their “courtship” is strained, as foreigners are prohibited from setting foot on the Japanese mainland, and the only relationships permitted between Japanese women and foreign men on Dejima are of the paid variety. Jacob has larger trouble, though; when he refuses to sign off on a bogus shipping manifest, his stint on Dejima is extended and he’s demoted, stuck in the service of a vengeful fellow clerk. Meanwhile, Orito’s father dies deeply in debt, and her stepmother sells her into service at a mountaintop shrine where her midwife skills are in high demand, she soon learns, because of the extraordinarily sinister rituals going on in the secretive shrine. This is where the slow-to-start plot kicks in, and Mitchell pours on the heat with a rescue attempt by Orito’s first love, Uzaemon, who happens to be Jacob’s translator and confidant. Mitchell’s ventriloquism is as sharp as ever; he conjures men of Eastern and Western science as convincingly as he does the unscrubbed sailor rabble. Though there are more than a few spots of embarrassingly bad writing (“How scandalized Nagasaki shall be,
thinks Uzaemon, if the truth is ever known
”), Mitchell’s talent still shines through, particularly in the novel’s riveting final act, a pressure-cooker of tension, character work, and gorgeous set pieces. It’s certainly no Cloud Atlas
, but it is a dense and satisfying historical with literary brawn and stylistic panache.