The Thousand Autumns…

I have heard it said that autumn is the ideal season for reading books. In that case, I can readily recommend ‘The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet’. It is the latest novel by David Mitchell, and tells the story of a Dutch clerk working on Dejima, the man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki which functioned as Japan’s only contact with the outside world during the Edo era.

David Mitchell is widely regarding as one of Britain’s best young novelists. He started to write while working as an English teacher in Hiroshima in the nineties, and many of his works are set in, or have connections with, Japan. He is best known for ‘Cloud Atlas’, an incredible book which compromises various interconnected stories from different times and settings. ‘The Thousand Autumns…’ is just as ambitious, and is recommended for an advanced English learner, with an interest in how foreign writers interpret Japan and its history.

Coincidentally, one of David Mitchell’s key influences is Italo Calvino, an Italian writer whose ‘If on a winter’s night a traveler’ is also the inspiration for our current exhibition of photographs by Seiko Oka.