David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

… cup his nipples, and circle his navel, and knead his groin, and-

‘As a snail which melteth…’ Orito’s purpled eyes swivel open.

Jacob tries to wake up but the wire around his neck pulls tight.

‘… let every one pass away,’ quotes the corpse, ‘like the untimely birth…’

The Dutchman is covered with snails – bed, room, Dejima, all snails…

‘… like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun.’

Jacob sits up, wide awake, his pulse galloping away. I am in the House of Wistaria, and last night I slept with a prostitute. She is here, with a mousy snore caught in her throat. The air is warm and fetid with the smells of sex, tobacco, soiled linen and over-boiled cabbage from the chamber pot. Creation’s light is pure on the papered window. Amorous thumps and titters emanate from a nearby room. He thinks about Orito and Uzaemon in various shades of guilt, and closes his eyes, but then he sees them more clearly, Orito locked, reaped and harvested, and Uzaemon hacked to death, and Jacob thinks, Because of you, and he opens his eyes. But thought has no eyelids to close or ears to block, and Jacob remembers Interpreter Kobayashi’s announcement that Ogawa Uzaemon had been slain by mountain bandits on a pilgrimage to the town of Kashima. Lord Abbot Enomoto had hunted down the eleven outlaws responsible for the atrocity and tortured them to death, but not even vengeance, Kobayashi had opined, can bring the dead to life. Chief van Cleef sent the Company’s condolences to Ogawa the Elder, but the interpreter never returned to Dejima again, and nobody was surprised when he died shortly after. Any faint doubts in de Zoet’s mind that Enomoto had killed Ogawa Uzaemon were dispelled a few weeks later when Goto Shinpachi reported that the previous night’s fire on the eastern slope had begun in the library of the old Ogawa Residence. That evening, by lamplight, Jacob retrieved the dogwood scroll-tube from under his floorboards and began the most exacting mental labour of his life. The scroll was not long – its title and twelve clauses ran to a little more than three hundred characters – but Jacob had had to acquire the vocabulary and grammar entirely in secret. None of the interpreters would risk being caught teaching Japanese to a foreigner, though Goto Shinpachi would sometimes answer Jacob’s casual questions about specific words. Without Marinus’s knowledge of Oriental languages the task would have been impossible, but Jacob dared not show the doctor the scroll for fear of implicating his friend. It took two hundred nights to decipher the Creeds of the Order of Mount Shiranui, nights that grew darker as Jacob groped closer and closer to its revelations. And now that the work is done, he wonders, how can a closely watched foreigner ever transform it into justice? He would need the sympathetic ear of a man as powerful as the Magistrate to stand the remotest chance of seeing Orito freed and Enomoto brought to justice. What would happen, he wonders, to a Chinaman in Middelburg who sought to prosecute the Duke of Zeeland for immorality and infanticide?

The man in the nearby room is blurting, ‘Oh oh Mijn God, Mijn God!’

Melchior van Cleef: Jacob blushes and hopes his girl doesn’t wake.

Prudishness the morning after, he must admit, is a hypocrite’s guilt.

His condom of goat’s intestine lies in a square of paper by the futon.

It is a revolting object, Jacob thinks. So, for that matter, am I…

Jacob thinks about Anna. He must dissolve their vow.

That kind and honest girl deserves, he thinks unflinchingly, a truer husband.

He imagines her father’s happiness when she tells him the news.

She may have dissolved her vow to me, he admits, months ago…

No ship from Batavia this year meant no trading season and no letters…

A water-vendor in the street below calls out, ‘O-miiizu, O-miiizu, O-miiizu.’

… and the threat of insolvency for Dejima and Nagasaki looms larger.

Melchior van Cleef arrives at his ‘OOOOOOoOoOoOoooo…’

Don’t wake, Jacob begs the sleeping woman, don’t wake, don’t wake…

Her name is Tsukinami, ‘Moon Wave’: Jacob liked her shyness.

Though shyness, too, he suspects, can be applied with paint and powder.

Once they were alone, Tsukinami complimented him on his Japanese.

He hopes he did not revolt her. She called his eyes ‘decorated’.

She asked to snip off a lock of his copper hair to remember him by.

Post-climactic van Cleef laughs like a pirate seeing a rival mauled by sharks.

And is this Orito’s life, Jacob shudders, as Ogawa’s scroll describes?

Millstones in his conscience grind, grind and grind…

The bell of Ryûgaji Temple announces the Hour of the Rabbit. Jacob puts on his breeches and shirt, cups some water from the pitcher, drinks and washes, and opens the window. The view is fit for a viceroy: Nagasaki falls away, in stepped alleyways and up-thrust roofs, in duns, ochres and charcoals, down to the ark-like Magistracy, Dejima, and beyond to the slovenly sea…

He obeys a mischievous impulse to shimmy out along the ridge of the roof.

His bare feet grip the still-cool tiles: there is a sculpted carp to hold on to.

Saturday, October 18th in the year 1800 is calm and blue.

Starlings fly in nebulae: like a child in a fairy-tale, Jacob longs to join them.

Or else, he daydreams, let my round eyes become nomadic ovals…

West to east, the sky unrolls and rolls its atlas of clouds.

… my pink skin turn dull gold; my freakish hair, a sensible black…

From an alleyway, the clatter of a night-cart threatens his reverie.

… and my boorish body become one of theirs… poised and sleek.

Eight liveried horses proceed along a thoroughfare. Their hoofs echo.

How far would I get, Jacob wonders, if I ran, hooded, through the streets?

… up through rice terraces, up to the folded mountains, the folds within folds.

Not so far as Kyôga Domain, Jacob thinks. Someone fumbles at a casement.

He readies himself to be ordered inside by a worried official.

‘Did gallant Sir de Zoet,’ hairy and naked van Cleef flashes his teeth, ‘find the golden fleece last night?’

‘It was…’ not, Jacob thinks, to my credit ‘… it was what it was, sir.’

‘Oh, hearken to Father Calvin.’ Van Cleef puts on his breeches and clambers out of the window to join him with a flagon hooked on his thumb. He is not drunk, Jacob hopes, but he is not altogether sober. ‘Our Divine Father made all of you, man, in his own image, under-tackle included – or do I lie?’

‘God did make us, yes, but the Holy Book is clear about-’

‘Oh, lawful wedlock, awful bedlock, yes, yes, well and good in Europe, but here -’ van Cleef gestures at Nagasaki like a conductor ‘- a man must improvise! Celibacy is for vegetarians. Neglect your spuds – I quote a medical fact – and they shrivel up and drop off and what future then -’

‘That is not,’ Jacob almost smiles, ‘a medical fact, sir.’

‘- what future then for the Prodigal Son on the Isle of Walcheren, sans cods?’ Van Cleef swigs from his flagon, wiping his beard on his forearm. ‘Bachelordom and an heirless death! Lawyers feasting on your estate like crows on a gibbet! This fine house,’ he slaps the ridge-tile, ‘is no sink of iniquity but a spa to nourish later harvests – you did use the armour urged upon us by Marinus? But who am I talking to? Of course you did.’

Van Cleef’s girl watches them from the depths of her room.

Jacob wonders about Orito’s eyes, now.

‘A pretty little butterfly on the outside…’ a sigh heaves van Cleef and Jacob fears his superior is drunker than he thought – a fall could end in a broken neck ‘… but unwrapped, one finds the same disappointments. ’Tweren’t the girl’s fault, it’s Gloria’s fault, the albatross hanging ’round my neck… But why would you want to hear about that, young man, with your heart not yet broken?’ The Chief stares in the face of Heaven and the breeze stirs the world. ‘Gloria was my aunt. Batavia-born, I was, but sent to Amsterdam to learn the gentlemanly arts: how to spout pig Latin, how to dance like a peacock and how to cheat at cards. The party ended on my twenty-second birthday when I took passage back to Java with my uncle Theo. Uncle Theo had visited Holland to deliver the Governor-General’s yearly fictions to East India House – the van Cleefs were well connected in those days – grease palms and marry for the fourth or fifth time. My uncle’s motto was “Race is All”. He’d fathered half a dozen children on his Javanese maids, but he acknowledged none and made dire warnings about God’s discrete races mingling into a single pigsty breed.’