Last month I was visiting the MFA in Boston. After an hour or two of wandering through rooms sporting giant, bombastic 19th century American paintings, I came upon a dim hall with small, colorful prints hanging from the wall, like this one:



This was my first taste of Utagawa Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, and I was immediately transfixed.

Although the Edo referred to in the Hiroshige prints is a place (a city later to be renamed Tokyo), Edo also refers to the period of Japanese history starting from around the turn of the 17th century through the late 19th century. I know nothing of Japanese history, but like all good art, the Hiroshige prints evoke their place and time so vividly that by the time I left the hall I felt like an expert on the Tokugawa shogunate. When I got home I ordered several reproductions of my favorite pieces.

Coincidentally, during my trip to Boston, I was reading Cloud Atlas, and was becoming one of the millions to fall under its spell, and so when shortly thereafter I saw Mitchell’s new book in my local bookstore sporting a Hiroshige print on its cover (the very same one shown above, in fact, titled “Sugatami Bridge, Omokage Bridge”), and when I saw that it was set in Nagasaki during the Edo period at the turn of the 19th century, I immediately put my request in at the library and bided my time.

Edo-era Japan was notoriously insular, and the island of Dejima, the geographic locus of this novel, epitomizes that insularity: Dutch traders to Japan could not set foot in the Japanese nation, but this tiny artificial island in Nagasaki bay could house the Dutch garrison because it was not technically Japanese soil.

On this island just before the turn of the 19th century arrives Jacob de Zoet, a devout, somewhat naïve Dutch clerk with an I-cannot-tell-a-lie kind of honesty. Although tasked by the new Chief Resident to document the corruption that has afflicted the Dutch operation in the years preceding his arrival, Jacob soon gets caught up in a series of intrigues, including bending his ethics to assist the Chief Resident in his negotiations to increase the copper quota, a shady transaction with one of Nagasaki’s most powerful and shady players, and internecine squabbles among his own people culminating in a nasty double cross of sorts. And then he meets Orito, a Japanese woman with a burn mark covering half her face, falls in love, and we’re off to the races.

Jacob’s interest in Orito, which is the string that pulls us through the first third of the novel, feels a bit forced at first, almost as if the author is nudging the two together and saying “there there you two, go develop a love interest so I can get this novel off the ground.” Likewise, early on, the dialog among the Dutch feels similarly forced, with authorial interruptions separating the first clause of a character’s words from the rest, and a very stylized patois that at times strikes a false note. But as the story builds a head of steam and the characters evolve their individual quiddity this weakness fall away and, from around page 150 or so I was captive.

As the story progresses, following its various strands to a hermetic mountain monastery with a dark secret, to an uninvited British frigate that shows up on Nagasaki Harbor one day, to the halls of the local magistrate and back to grungy old Dejima, we are treated to dozens of colorful stories told by various members of the novel’s large ensemble cast. As I mentioned in one of my status update, these self-enclosed tales, in addition to serving as extended characterization (and treating us to instances of Mitchell’s virtuosity for clever argot), are little way stations where we get a breather from the snowballing tension of the plot and can revel in pure storytelling for the space of a page or two.

In Cloud Atlas, the disparate narratives seemed to be driving home a point about human greed leading to a dehumanized, destructive society, and this theme creeps up here as well. Here’s a passage from later in the book where a slave on Dejima talks about the trade his masters engage in:

“Their talk turns to owning, or to profit, or loss, or buying, or selling, or stealing, or hiring, or renting, or swindling. For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing!”

It's hard not to feel the truth of this by the end of this story.

This is a novel that combines the very best of literary virtuosity with the historical verisimilitude of first-rate period drama with the slow and skillful build up and rapid release of tension that I associate with the best thrillers. It was a real pleasure to spend a week with it.