She slips between the bigger, taller onlookers, unnoticed …
… and adjusts her headscarf, the better to hide her burn.
She places her cool palms on Jacob’s fever-glazed face.
Jacob sees himself, when he was young, in her narrow eyes.
Her lips touch the place between his eyebrows.
A well-waxed paper door slides open.
acknowledgments
First, the author wishes to thank the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Dutch Fund for Literature for providing an invaluable residency at NIAS for the first half of 2006.
Second, general thanks to Nadeem Aslam, Piet Baert, Manuel Berri, Evan Camfield, Wayson Choy, Harm Damsma, Walter Donohue, David Ebershoff, Johnny de Falbe, Tijs Goldschmidt, Tally Garner, Trish Kerr, Martin Kingston, Sharon Klein, Tania Kuteva, Hari Kunzru, Henry Jeffreys, Jonny Geller, Jynne Martin, Niek Miedema, Cees Nooteboom, Al Oliver, Hazel Orme, Lidewijde Paris, Jonathan Pegg, Noel Redding, Ruth Tross, Michael Schellenberg, Mike Shaw, Alan Spence, Doug Stewart, Professor Arjo Vanderjagt, Klaas and Gerrie de Vries, Carole Welch my patient editor, Professor Henk Wesselling, Dr. George E van Zanen.
Third, specific thanks to Kees’t Hart, Ship Manager Robert Hovell of HM Frigate Unicorn in Dundee, Archivist Peter Sijnke of Middelburg, and Professor Cynthia Vialle of the University of Leiden for answering a plethora of questions. Research sources were numerous, but this novel is indebted especially to the scholarship of Professor Timon Screech of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, Beatrice M. Bodart-Bailey’s annotated translation of Kaempfer’s Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed (as read by Captain Penhaligon), and Annick M. Doeff’s translation of her ancestor Hendrik Doeff’s memoir, Recollections of Japan.
Fourth, thanks to the in-house illustrators Jenny and Stan Mitchell, and in-house translator of Japanese sources Keiko Yoshida.
Lastly, thanks to Lawrence Norfolk and his family.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAVID MITCHELL is the author of Ghostwritten, Number9Dream, Cloud Atlas, and Black Swan Green. He is a two-time finalist for the Booker Prize and one of Granta magazine’s best young British novelists. He lives in Ireland with his wife and two children.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by David Mitchell
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in the United Kingdom by Sceptre, a division of Hodder and Stoughton, London, in 2010.
The illustrations on chapter 3, chapter 19, and chapter 26 are by Jenny Mitchell. The illustration on chapter 22 is by Stanley Mitchell. The illustration on chapter 1 is from William Smellie, A Sett of Anatomical Tables, with Explanations, and an Abridgment, of the Practice of Midwifery (London, 1754). The illustration on chapter 11 is from William Cheselden, Osteographia, or the Anatomy of the Bones (London, 1733). The illustration on chapter 16 is from Robert Hooke, Micrographia: or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses: with Observations and Enquiries Thereupon by R. Hooke (London, 1665).
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Mitchell, David (David Stephen)
The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet : a novel / David Mitchell.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60358-0
1. Deshima (Nagasaki-shi, Japan)—Fiction.
2. Japan—History—1787–1868—Fiction.
3. East and West—Fiction.
4. Trading posts—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6063.I785T47 2010
823′.914—dc22 2009047296
www.atrandom.com
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