Turning Japanese

The wunderkind of British experimental fiction, David Mitchell, spent four years researching his latest novel, an historical epic set in eighteen century Japan, but whose earth-shaking themes have very modern resonances. David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is one of those rare books – a multilayered literary novel that's bound to please both critics and readers, be nominated for awards and, like his last novel, Cloud Atlas, sit atop bestseller lists. It's a finely crafted, beautifully written book and a thumping good read.

Set during the Edo era, Japan's self-imposed period of isolation, Dejima, an artificial island in Nagasaki harbour is the country's one window to the outside world and the trading post of the Dutch East India Company (VOC).
Hoping to make his fortune and marry his sweetheart back home, Jacob de Zoet, an incorruptible clerk, arrives in Dejima in 1799. Back in Europe, the Napoleonic Wars are being fought; the Batavian Republic (the Netherlands) falls to the French; and through corruption and mismanagement the VOC is a financial wreck.
Having taken longer on this novel – four years – than any of his previous, Mitchell's skill in recreating the late eighteenth century is the product of many years of research.
"I was doing research even up until a few weeks before handing it in," he says. "You look things up and one clue leads to another and suddenly you find that, no, they wouldn't have used that word in the eighteenth century or actually, that way of lighting a room wouldn't have existed then."
"I did some research in archives in Leiden in Holland; I did conventional research but then I read novels to learn how ships in the Napoleonic era worked and non-fiction sources as well; I read a small hill of eighteenth century novels to try and pick up phrases and vocabulary. Then of course, once you've done all that you have to hide it otherwise you get sentences like: 'Shall we take the four-horse phaeton into town my lady, or would you prefer the two-horse barouche-landau?' That will kill your fiction, so nine-tenths of it has to be below the waterline."
"In the case of this book, and it almost killed me, I must confess, is that it's three lost worlds – that of the Japanese Edo era; the late eighteenth century Netherlands, although you have to be careful with the names; and the eighteenth century British Royal Navy which was vast enough to qualify for the term a 'world'; it was a world, distinct from England. Three worlds that I had to recreate and keep going in my head. It's certainly the hardest thing I've ever written."
De Zoet is based on an historical character, Hendrik Doeff, who defended Dejima when the British Navy tried to capture the trading post. However, De Zoet is not Doeff and Mitchell's novel is fictional. Which begs the question, as a writer, where does one draw the line between fact and fiction?
"That's exactly it!" exclaims Mitchell. "That's exactly the problem. On one of my first attempts to write it, about six months and one hundred pages in, I realized I was too close to Doeff and I seemed to be writing a rather adorned biography of the man, which wouldn't do."
"The HMS Phaeton arrived in 1808 but I wanted to start in the last year of the eighteenth century for other reasons. I wanted enough history to have a British frigate sailing into Nagasaki, but I needed to bend history enough to not have my characters hanging around for eight years. I brought it forward and called the ship the Phoebus, which in Greek mythology would have been the father of Phaeton.
"So where do you draw the line? At the right place!" he laughs. "Trial and error. I went wrong twice. My first take went wrong because there was too much history; my second take went wrong because there was too much novel. The third one, as Goldilocks found, was just right, or hopefully it was!"
"You have to give yourself a license for fiction, or maybe a license to fiction, when it comes to the drama of narrative, and if this requires the bending of lesser historical fact, then so be it. I think it would have been unwise to change the dates of the Napoleonic Wars, for example, because then all of a sudden we're into an alternative history."
Despite the historic setting and Mitchell's attention to detail, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a work of fiction. The middle section of the book is devoted to Orito, a young Japanese midwife who has been given permission to study under Dejima's Dutch doctor and who captivates De Zoet. After her father dies, Orito is kidnapped by a sinister cult and sent to a shrine in the mountains.
"It's not based on historical fact, however it is worth saying that certainly at the time involved the mountains of Kiso were pretty inaccessible. The losing side of the Battle of Sekigahara hid in the mountains for many generations. Necromantic cults like that who were worshipping in some sort of eccentric form of Shinto are not impossible, but that's as far as I can go. The rest is a product of imagination."
Although British-born Mitchell now lives in Cork, he spent many years teaching English in Japan. Surely placing a character like De Zoet in a country and culture so different to his own must have had a particular appeal for the author?
"Only in the sense that it made it more doable," says Mitchell. "To write about of the aboriginal inhabitants of Patagonia would have needed a lot of research. Japan is more like home turf for me. More difficult than the Japanese were the Dutch, actually – that was the new culture that I had to read about and try and understand. That was a taller order than the Japanese, ironically, as they're just over the English Channel rather than on the other side of the world."