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title: "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel"
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# The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel

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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel [Mitchell, David] on desertcart.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel

Review: Astonishing, moving historical fiction and rich characterization make this a masterpiece - Given that the only book by David Mitchell that I had read before was Cloud Atlas, I wasn't quite sure what to expect from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - I knew it was widely regarded, but little more than that, not even the setting. (And, from what I've read, it's not quite as genre-bending as some of Mitchell's other works, so it may not have been a representative choice from his works.) What I got, in many ways, couldn't be more different from Cloud Atlas, but it's no less beautiful, powerful, and astonishingly well-written, and by the time I finished it, I knew I had read another masterpiece from Mitchell. A historical fiction, Thousand Autumns details the lives of officers in the Dutch East Indies company stationed near Nagasaki right around the dawn of the 19th century. That's a wholly, utterly foreign world to most Western readers, and much of the book's first section finds Mitchell exploring the culture and society through his characters, letting the world come to life as he subtly sows seeds for the plot threads to come. And then, before you know it, you're lost in Mitchell's rich world, entranced by his complicated, utterly human characters, and caught up in his dense plotting, which involves everything from the British empire to a sect of Japanese monks with horrific beliefs. And just when you think Mitchell has lost track of everything, he pulls it together in two astonishing final chapters that left me stunned, moved, and on the verge of tears at his powerful ending. But the plotting is never really the focus of Thousand Autumns; what fascinates Mitchell, and by extension, the reader, are the characters that populate the world, and the way they're governed by their pasts, their cultures, their senses of honor and betrayal, and a desire to make the most of their lives as best as they can. What Mitchell ends up doing here is telling a story that could be told at no other time in history, but making it beautifully, wonderfully contemporary in the emotions and feelings it deals with. More than that, he succeeds in immersing you in a world that you could never experience, and makes it come to life in such a vivid way that you not only picture it, but can feel yourself getting lost in it. And that, along with Mitchell's astonishing, beautiful prose, makes Thousand Autumns a masterpiece worth savoring.
Review: Slightly flawed, but innovative and affecting - Shoving readers with frightful immediacy into a place and era that hasn't exactly been extensively portrayed in contemporary Western fiction, David Mitchell's "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" is easily the finest novel set in turn-of-the-18th-century Japan I've ever read, and should manage to equally impress both literary buffs who like the occasionally history lesson and history nerds who want to inject some fiction into their reading. Setting its human drama and occasional bawdy comedy against the backdrop of a society in flux, it takes readers back to a time before airplanes, cell phones, and the Travel Channel, when trips abroad were long and perilous and information was scarce and closely guarded. In lesser hands the novel could be a dry historical, but Mitchell shows an admirable willingness to get his hands dirty as he enlivens his tale of culture clash and forbidden love with plenty of violence, colorful language and anatomically explicit descriptions. Readers will likely be torn on the effectiveness of the various literary tricks that Mitchell employs (splicing lines of description together with lines of dialogue, especially, could strike readers as either brilliant or maddening), but there's little denying the emotional depth and attention to detail that he brings to the story. As the book's title suggests, its action is centered around the experiences of Jacob de Zoet, a young, devoutly Christian clerk who's joined a Dutch trade mission to Japan in an effort to earn his fortune and secure his bride of choice back home. Upon his arrival at the trading outpost of Dejima just outside Nagasaki, Jacob quickly finds himself plunged into a world dominated by intrigue, greed, and hidden agendas, where the Dutch and their Japanese hosts seemingly compete to see which side can be more duplicitous and arrogant. A romantic element is also introduced in the form of De Zoet's forbidden infatuation with a deformed Japanese midwife, but those expecting a standard-issue historical love story will be getting something else entirely. In spite of the tenuous moral center provided by De Zoet and a few like-minded characters, The Thousand Autumns is in many ways a deeply cynical novel, with depictions of altruism and fidelity greatly outnumbered by those of deceit, self-seeking and worse. Even De Zoet, who's so upstanding in relation to most of the other characters that he practically squeaks when he walks, harbors plenty of outsized ambitions and personal conflicts beneath the piety and rectitude on his surface. The book is at its best in its opening chapters, as it shoves together the combustible elements of a cranky, homesick Dutch trade mission reeling from years of graft and corruption and a shady Japanese contingent trying to wring every bit of money possible out of their guests. The narrative moves along at a pretty breakneck pace in these early chapters, although Mitchell does occasionally slow down to allow his characters to relate wrenching tales of brutality, deprivation, and levels of racial prejudice and hostility that would appall the average Klansman. The story bogs down a little bit in its middle section as Mitchell decides to focus on other, somewhat less interesting characters, but comes roaring back to life in its final act, shifting the focus back to De Zoet and introducing a potentially hostile British crew for a rousing final clash between would-be imperial powers. The final confrontation, along with the intrigues leading up to it, makes for a worthy ending for a book that manages to bring together a frequently bleak worldview and unflinching descriptiveness with bursts of poetic language and sentimentality that can bring a smile to even the most cynical of readers. Throughout the novel Mitchell portrays an existence that's significantly more nasty, brutish and short than in these relatively comfortable times, but he does manage to inject just enough decency and humor to keep the proceedings from getting truly depressing.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #64,247 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #204 in Historical British & Irish Literature #1,671 in Historical Fiction (Books) #2,295 in Literary Fiction (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.4 out of 5 stars 5,195 Reviews |

## Images

![The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/814QgHATIsL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Astonishing, moving historical fiction and rich characterization make this a masterpiece
*by J***E on March 21, 2013*

Given that the only book by David Mitchell that I had read before was Cloud Atlas, I wasn't quite sure what to expect from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - I knew it was widely regarded, but little more than that, not even the setting. (And, from what I've read, it's not quite as genre-bending as some of Mitchell's other works, so it may not have been a representative choice from his works.) What I got, in many ways, couldn't be more different from Cloud Atlas, but it's no less beautiful, powerful, and astonishingly well-written, and by the time I finished it, I knew I had read another masterpiece from Mitchell. A historical fiction, Thousand Autumns details the lives of officers in the Dutch East Indies company stationed near Nagasaki right around the dawn of the 19th century. That's a wholly, utterly foreign world to most Western readers, and much of the book's first section finds Mitchell exploring the culture and society through his characters, letting the world come to life as he subtly sows seeds for the plot threads to come. And then, before you know it, you're lost in Mitchell's rich world, entranced by his complicated, utterly human characters, and caught up in his dense plotting, which involves everything from the British empire to a sect of Japanese monks with horrific beliefs. And just when you think Mitchell has lost track of everything, he pulls it together in two astonishing final chapters that left me stunned, moved, and on the verge of tears at his powerful ending. But the plotting is never really the focus of Thousand Autumns; what fascinates Mitchell, and by extension, the reader, are the characters that populate the world, and the way they're governed by their pasts, their cultures, their senses of honor and betrayal, and a desire to make the most of their lives as best as they can. What Mitchell ends up doing here is telling a story that could be told at no other time in history, but making it beautifully, wonderfully contemporary in the emotions and feelings it deals with. More than that, he succeeds in immersing you in a world that you could never experience, and makes it come to life in such a vivid way that you not only picture it, but can feel yourself getting lost in it. And that, along with Mitchell's astonishing, beautiful prose, makes Thousand Autumns a masterpiece worth savoring.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Slightly flawed, but innovative and affecting
*by W***N on April 4, 2011*

Shoving readers with frightful immediacy into a place and era that hasn't exactly been extensively portrayed in contemporary Western fiction, David Mitchell's "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" is easily the finest novel set in turn-of-the-18th-century Japan I've ever read, and should manage to equally impress both literary buffs who like the occasionally history lesson and history nerds who want to inject some fiction into their reading. Setting its human drama and occasional bawdy comedy against the backdrop of a society in flux, it takes readers back to a time before airplanes, cell phones, and the Travel Channel, when trips abroad were long and perilous and information was scarce and closely guarded. In lesser hands the novel could be a dry historical, but Mitchell shows an admirable willingness to get his hands dirty as he enlivens his tale of culture clash and forbidden love with plenty of violence, colorful language and anatomically explicit descriptions. Readers will likely be torn on the effectiveness of the various literary tricks that Mitchell employs (splicing lines of description together with lines of dialogue, especially, could strike readers as either brilliant or maddening), but there's little denying the emotional depth and attention to detail that he brings to the story. As the book's title suggests, its action is centered around the experiences of Jacob de Zoet, a young, devoutly Christian clerk who's joined a Dutch trade mission to Japan in an effort to earn his fortune and secure his bride of choice back home. Upon his arrival at the trading outpost of Dejima just outside Nagasaki, Jacob quickly finds himself plunged into a world dominated by intrigue, greed, and hidden agendas, where the Dutch and their Japanese hosts seemingly compete to see which side can be more duplicitous and arrogant. A romantic element is also introduced in the form of De Zoet's forbidden infatuation with a deformed Japanese midwife, but those expecting a standard-issue historical love story will be getting something else entirely. In spite of the tenuous moral center provided by De Zoet and a few like-minded characters, The Thousand Autumns is in many ways a deeply cynical novel, with depictions of altruism and fidelity greatly outnumbered by those of deceit, self-seeking and worse. Even De Zoet, who's so upstanding in relation to most of the other characters that he practically squeaks when he walks, harbors plenty of outsized ambitions and personal conflicts beneath the piety and rectitude on his surface. The book is at its best in its opening chapters, as it shoves together the combustible elements of a cranky, homesick Dutch trade mission reeling from years of graft and corruption and a shady Japanese contingent trying to wring every bit of money possible out of their guests. The narrative moves along at a pretty breakneck pace in these early chapters, although Mitchell does occasionally slow down to allow his characters to relate wrenching tales of brutality, deprivation, and levels of racial prejudice and hostility that would appall the average Klansman. The story bogs down a little bit in its middle section as Mitchell decides to focus on other, somewhat less interesting characters, but comes roaring back to life in its final act, shifting the focus back to De Zoet and introducing a potentially hostile British crew for a rousing final clash between would-be imperial powers. The final confrontation, along with the intrigues leading up to it, makes for a worthy ending for a book that manages to bring together a frequently bleak worldview and unflinching descriptiveness with bursts of poetic language and sentimentality that can bring a smile to even the most cynical of readers. Throughout the novel Mitchell portrays an existence that's significantly more nasty, brutish and short than in these relatively comfortable times, but he does manage to inject just enough decency and humor to keep the proceedings from getting truly depressing.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Brilliant. Beautifully written. Well researched. A rare gem of an historical novel. 10 stars!
*by B***S on March 28, 2017*

Fascinating story. Brilliantly written. The "some sexual content" is written in obscure, sometime poetic, sometimes bored, no big deal language that is, in fact, not at all explicit. But you can figure it out, so I cannot say there is no sexual content. Plus one thread of the story follows a corrupt and sinister sexual cult run out of a shrine whose patron is the most powerful and dangerous Japanese official in the area. However, I would have given this book to my clever voraciously reading son, had it been around when he was 12 years old. I could hardly put this novel down. I wanted the pleasure of reading it never to stop. I kept backtracking, rereading passages and whole chapters just for the delight of the language. I laughed out loud, and I cried. It is a very complicated story, populated by assorted con artists, ugly Dutch trading company exploiters of whatever they can find to exploit, whose racial attitudes are those of the 1700s. And the Japanese are no better, except that is it their country they are trying to protect from being overtaken by outsiders. Japanese society was extremely rigid, with horrible tortures and punishments for all kinds of apparently slight infractions. But then the Dutch at that time were brutal in their quest to grab chunks of "empire" away from England and Spain. Japan was one of the few places where the people being exploited for trade managed to contain the foreign invaders, and made the trading company follow their rules. (While in the same time period, England and Spain were imposing their systems of law, religion, and culture on their subjugated colonies, with not much care for what the locals thought or wanted.) So in this time and place a young Dutch clerk, nephew of a protestant minister, has signed on with the Dutch Trading Company V.O.C. to make his fortune with a five year contract and return to Holland with enough money to win the heart of his future father-in-law, and be married to the girl he adores. We meet all the characters he has to live, work, and get along with, Dutch and Japanese, some earnest and fair, some merely greedy bastards, and some pure evil. He has to learn the language, keep his balance on the Company's tightrope while juggling the spoken and unspoken rules of both the the Company's and the Japanese officials' games. This group of outsiders is contained on a small trading island of warehouses, offices, and rooming houses for the officials of the Company, with only the Company men and their slaves and servants (and local bar girls) for social interaction. They are restricted from entering Japan proper. Their interactions with the Japanese are limited to formal business, translations, accounts, stock inventories, negotiating contracts for sales of various commodities, and trials and punishments for those caught breaking the many strict and arbitrary Japanese laws. This is no kind of a "junket," nor is it a particularly posh posting. Exotic yes, but most of young Jacob's co-workers lack the imagination to appreciate their environment as anything other than something to be endured, with the dream of wealth at the end of their term. Jacob does appreciate his surroundings, applies himself to learning Japanese, treats people fairly and with respect, but he gets in trouble because he is honest, and refuses to wink at his superior's fraudulent schemes to enrich themselves. The ending is not at all what I expected. I do not want to give anything away. It is both happier and sadder than I thought it might be. But it is a realistic and very satisfying end to a remarkable story. I have some Dutch ancestors, who in the 17th century went west, and ultimately ended up in one of England's colonies in North America. This book helps me imagine what their lives might have been, had they decided to sign on to a Dutch East Asia Company contract instead.

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*Last updated: 2026-01-27*