Mysterious Japan of the early 19th century... A distant and proud piece of the planet with its calendar and time of day (there you wake up at the hour of the Dragon, eat lunch at the hour of the Horse, and get ready for bed at the hour of the Pig), closed from other countries and peoples, ceremonialism elevated to the highest degree, originality of manners and cruelty of laws. A country where you cannot fully belong only to yourself, you are an inseparable part of your homeland.
David Mitchell was born in Southport, Merseyside, in England, raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, and educated at the University of Kent, studying for a degree in English and American Literature followed by an M.A. in Comparative Literature. He lived for a year in Sicily, then moved to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students for eight years, before returning to England. After another stint in Japan, he currently lives in Ireland with his wife Keiko and their two children.
As if by time machine, Mitchell, traversing centuries and continents, transported me to the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Bay in the eleventh year of the Kensei era, where I remained for many, many years, along with Jacob de Zoot and the other characters of this literary masterpiece. After reading just a few pages and recovering from the description of the first scene, you are instantly immersed in a world of eastern traditions, hieroglyphics, laconic and beautiful in its simplicity aesthetics, complex language, the code of the samurai, in which foreigners - employees of the Dutch East India Company factories are trying to get along, find their place under the sun, and some just to survive. Yes, as much as I would love to travel to the real Japan, admiring the rock gardens, the majestic Fujiyama, walking through the alleys of cherry trees and drinking tea under the roofs of traditional pagodas, the reader along with a young Dutch clerk will have to know Japan from its coast.
Dejima is a place where women are forbidden to enter unless they are prostitutes, a commercial settlement separated from "greater Japan" by a single bridge. Here, as in the rest of the country, Christianity is forbidden, self-isolation, here the resident becomes rather a foreigner, stuck on the island for many years in his dependence on the welfare or the collapse of his employer - the trading company.
The faction appears as a kind of knot in which the fates of people of different blood, ranks, sex, professions, characters, principles are intertwined. Hardened common sailors and officers, merchants, interpreters, doctors, slaves, samurai, religious figures, officials.
Mitchell told many life stories, guiding the reader through each character's past and allowing him to draw his own conclusion about each: this one is a good fellow who endures the misfortunes of his integrity, and that one is a greedy scoundrel, that one is a victim of national family traditions, and that girl deserves a woman's happiness.
The narrative reminded me of the prevailing climate - then a smooth calm description of everyday life, as if in calm windless weather, then as a storm with a storm - intense turn of events, tragic denouements, dramatic at times over the top. And the characters became dear to us, we felt for them with all our souls!
The dialogues, what dialogues! Full of irony, humor, sarcasm, half hints, subtexts, sometimes on the contrary, unconcealed emotion in moments when you lose your temper.
I can't say that it was easy to read, the text, if I may say so, is dense - meaningful, filled with terms, layered descriptions, names, titles, but it was an enjoyable labor. Although the real labor is the work itself, which opened up to the reader the unfamiliar, closed world of the Land of the Rising Sun or Five Thousand Autumns.
What's not in there! Some have a desire for science, for knowledge that the rest of the world enjoys, others worship spirits, practice sacrifice, some heal, some steal. Some kill. One can fall in love there, but in secret, for not every woman is allowed to confess her feelings. And carry her love through life. There was a place for noble deeds and displays of true courage, sometimes on the brink of life and death, the eternal questions about their own destiny, about duty to the country, about indifference and participation, about their own faith, about a hard choice.
The overall impression of the book - sad with a light tinge of sadness, fascinating, large-scale, elegant, informative, philosophical. I had to let these feelings "infuse" a few days to realize the beauty of the story of Jacob de Zoot and his life on a Japanese island.
P.S. After reading the novel, you will even recognize how it resembles the plot of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, I was quite surprised to see the parallel (I'll say nothing about the detailed descriptions of everyday life. I, a countryman, did not know, for example, that in those days they used goat guts as a condom.)
This article was sponsored by Steven Spector
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