1799, Dejima, Nagasaki: The Japanese Empire only has a single port that keeps it open to the rest of the world, and one day a man by the name of Jacob de Zoet arrives there. His purpose? He has exactly five years to earn a fortune in the East and then come back to Holland in order to win the hand of his beloved fiancée.
Being only a young clerk, Jacob starts to try and scrape whatever money he can, hoping to climb the pyramid from bottom to top. However, he one day meets Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured wife of the magistrate.
As Jacob spends more and more time with Orito he starts to develop doubts about not only what he is doing, but about whether he should pursue pleasure or wealth in life. Day after day Jacobs vision becomes increasingly clouded, and being the young fool he is he gets himself into a promise he can’t back out of.
Unfortunately for him, the rash promise he made is broken, and when it comes to breaking promises, well let’s just say that the Japanese tend to tend to take it somewhat more seriously than in the West. The consequences of Jacob’s action begin to unfold, and he sees that regardless of how bad things may seem right now, they will get much worse before the end… before his end.
As Jacob spends more and more time with Orito he starts to develop doubts about not only what he is doing, but about whether he should pursue pleasure or wealth in life. Day after day Jacobs vision becomes increasingly clouded, and being the young fool he is he gets himself into a promise he can’t back out of.
Unfortunately for him, the rash promise he made is broken, and when it comes to breaking promises, well let’s just say that the Japanese tend to tend to take it somewhat more seriously than in the West. The consequences of Jacob’s action begin to unfold, and he sees that regardless of how bad things may seem right now, they will get much worse before the end… before his end.
While David Mitchell is known to write books such as Cloud Atlas or Ghostwritten where multiple stories are told in parallel, this time he went for a much more traditional approach to things, writing a historical novel about a pious clerk’s troubles with the deceitful trading culture of the Nagasaki harbor.
Every single page is overflowing with precise descriptions that don’t drag on, with interesting events and remarkable characters; every word has its own place and meaning in the story… and what a story it is.
 | David MitchellDavid Mitchell is an English novelist who has, so far, written six novels, two of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Those two novels are Number9Dream and Cloud Atlas. In 2013 both he and his wife worked to translate a book written by a 13 year-old Japanese boy about autism, titled The Reason I Jump. |
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