The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

Picking slugs from the cabbages with a pair of chopsticks, Jacob notices a ladybird on his right hand. He makes a bridge for it with his left, which the insect obligingly crosses. Jacob repeats the exercise several times. The ladybird believes, he thinks, she is on a momentous journey, but she is going nowhere. He pictures an endless sequence of bridges between skin-covered islands over voids, and wonders if an unseen force is playing the same trick on him …

“The printed word is food,” says Marinus, “and you look hungry, Domburger.”

But an ink brush, she thinks, is a skeleton key for a prisoner’s mind.

“Science, like a general, is identifying its enemies: received wisdom and untested assumption; superstition and quackery; the tyrants’ fear of educated commoners; and, most pernicious of all, man’s fondness for fooling himself.

Mist blurs the farmhouses, erases the road ahead, hides the valley walls …

Winter woods are creaking, knitted and knotted. Dead leaves lie in deep drifts. Needle tips of birdsong stitch and thread the thicket’s many layers. Shuzai and Uzaemon climb in silence. Here the Mekura River is a bellowing, roiling, echoing thing. The granite sky entombs the valley.

Crows smear rumors across the matted, sticky sky.

To a degree, the historical novelist must create a sort of dialect—I call it “Bygonese”—which is inaccurate but plausible. Like a coat of antique-effect varnish on a new pine dresser, it is both synthetic and the least-worst solution.