Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet author David Mitchell
One of the most celebrated authors of his generation, British novelist David Mitchell won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for best British novel by a writer under 35) with his debut effort, Ghostwritten. He went on to write thematically daring, structurally complex works like number9dream; this month’s A.V. Club Wrapped Up In Books selection, Cloud Atlas; and the semi-autobiographical Black Swan Green. His latest, The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet, is a poetic, moving story of a Dutch trader’s travails in late-18th-century Japan. Mitchell lived in Japan for eight years, and also spent time in Italy; we spoke to him at home in Ireland, where he had just returned after a book tour of America.
The A.V. Club: The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet won you a lot of praise, both in the U.S. and abroad. Did you anticipate how well it would be received? Is that something you consider when you’re preparing a book?
David Mitchell: When you’re writing, no. You can’t think too much about reception. That’s a luxury that just isn’t involved. All you can think about is how to make the book work, and through all possible readers, it gets condensed down into one particular reader—which is largely me, and probably my wife as well. It all gets distilled down into that one reader, and if it works for that reader, then hopefully it’ll work for everybody else. As regards this particular book’s intended reception, no—I handled the book as a bag of nerves, actually, just thinking I’d chosen something far too obscure, a misty niche of Japanese history. I began to worry, during those three days that it takes the editor to read it; during that time, I became anxious that the effort had been toward something much too obscure, and that my literary career would go shooting down in flames. But luckily, my editor gave me a good response back, and again luckily, that’s continued up until the present with many people who have read the book.
AVC: You lived in Japan for a number of years, but was there anything in particular about this period of Japanese history that drew you to write about it?
DM: It was Dejima [an artificial island in the Nagasaki harbor that became a Dutch trading colony] itself. Specifically, what it was—this strange, singular, confined meeting place that not many people know about the existence of. I wanted to get that in a book somehow. One level to work through is the people who lived there, how the Dutch and the Japanese would see one another, particularly during Napoleonic times, when the ships stopped being able to get through from Batavia [modern-day Jakarta]. What would it have been like to be marooned there, not knowing why the ships had stopped arriving, not knowing why you were cut off the way you were? And then whether you’d ever see home again, or if you’d die in this strange, mystifying, in some ways unfriendly place. So all of these things, through Dejima, are why I wrote the book.
AVC: Did you begin thinking about the book when you were still in Japan, or did it come to you after you’d already left?
DM: Both, really. I found out about it when I was there—this is when I was 24, before I got disciplined about writing—and even then, I knew I wanted to do something with the place, and I hoped nobody would write a book set there in the meantime. But it took me a very long time to get around to writing about Dejima. That was the wise part of me, knowing how difficult it would be to write a book set there. Once I finally had the idea, though, and I started to write, I realized it was sort of an anti-narrative enclosure. There was a point where Dejima just stopped these illegal encounters between the Europeans and the Japanese; the unexpected events that make a novel stopped happening in reality. So I sort of realized I’d wandered into a trap. [Laughs.] A place to trap unwary Western novelists—and unwary Japanese novelists as well. That’s why there was a part of me that realized it was going to be a very difficult novel to write, and kept putting it off. So I didn’t actually start it until a few years after I’d left Japan.
AVC: A number of the comments we’ve gotten from people who have read it say they found it particularly interesting because so little has been written about that time and place.
DM: That’s encouraging to hear, and it reminds me: Never underestimate the reader. I will be less afraid of the byways and side lanes of history in the future, I think.
