Yesterday: celebrated my mum’s birthday, with cake and all.
Today: tired day, after a bad night’s sleep for Adrian (stuffed nose again). Just pottering around and waiting for time to pass. I started knitting a hat for Adrian, since the old one (from Ingrid’s baby days) is getting floppy and losing its shape and getting into his eyes.
David Mitchell writes impressively varied books. The first one I read, Cloud Atlas, was a story-within-story concoction of speculative fiction. The second one, Black Swan Green, was about a teenager in 1980s Britain. And The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a thriller set in the Dutch trading post at Nagasaki around the year 1800.
It is a carefully constructed book, and just as in Cloud Atlas, there are really several stories here, told in different registers. The stories are all “in line” and in chronological order, rather than embedded in each other, but each has a distinct focus and a characteristic tone. In a single book, Mitchell manages to combine a Shogun-style story of discovering Japan with an adventure story, with a delicate romance, with a tiny bit of military thriller thrown in as well, and some Dracula-like gothic horror, too, for good measure.
There is life at the trading post, viewed through the eyes of Jacob de Zoet, a junior clerk of the Dutch East India Company, has just arrived at Dejima, a small artificial island outside Nagasaki, which is the only place the Dutch are allowed to stay. He is tasked with untangling the records of previous years’ trading, since it appears that the company has lost a lot to corruption and private trading. Here the tiny colony is the world, and Japan proper is alien and outside.
There is life in Japan, still feudal but increasingly run by merchants and moneylenders rather than samurai warriors. We see this life through the eyes of Ogawa Uzaemon, an interpreter. Here Japan is the world, and the Dutch are weird outsiders – and the shift is complete, and the point of view as fully realized as the previous one.
Linking the two men and providing the motive power for the thriller aspect of the story, and indeed setting all the pieces in motion, is Orito Aibagawa. Daughter of a samurai, she is learning Western-style medicine and midwifery from a doctor stationed at the trading post. It will come as no surprise that both men are in love with her.
Mitchell is a masterful user of the English language. There is excellent colourful dialogue – creating a sense of 18th century colloquial Dutch, and of broken Dutch as spoken by more or less Japanese interpreters, with modern English as your only tool, is an impressive feat. There is humour as well as lyrical beauty. Every sentence is exquisitely crafted, but (with the exception of one two-page section) without feeling pretentious.
It is a rich and complex story, sub-plots all feeding into a main one, minor encounters that later turn out to be crucial to making events unfold just so. The colour of a man’s hair makes a naval battle turn one way rather than the other.
I could hardly put this book down once I’d started. It is a wonderful book, engaging, thrilling, rich and beautiful. Dazzling. Brilliant. A delight. (I am running out of suitable praise here.) Read it and enjoy.
Yesterday was a routine Wednesday with playgroup for Adrian. A friend of Ingrid’s came home with us in the afternoon; the house looked like a battlefield afterwards.
Today we went to town to buy a birthday present for my mum, and managed to get a whole bunch of other small errands done, too: everything from an oven mitt to a princess tiara. (Whenever Ingrid has a friend over, the dress-up clothes come out, especially the princess-ish stuff. We had two tiaras but one broke, and there’s often friction about who gets to wear the remaining one. So now we have to again.)
We had what I thought was a super-safe lunch, sharing one tempura dish and one small sushi. I skipped both the tempura sauce and the soy sauce for sushi. (I believe Adrian is sensitive to soy protein and not just milk – I forgot to mention this in the 5-month post.) And STILL Adrian spent an hour screaming later in the afternoon, the worst such episode in many weeks. Main learning point for me: do not mix two foods when eating out, because now I don’t know whether it was the sushi (something in those fake “crab” sticks?) or the tempura.
Went to Ingrid’s dance-and-play group only to find out it’s not on this week because of school holidays. She was disappointed but the leisurely trip back home (with Adrian asleep all the time, exhausted from his earlier screaming) almost made up for it, with jumping over puddles, poking holes in snow banks with a forked branch, etc.
Spent almost an hour in the morning walking back and forth in the living room and kitchen while Adrian slept an unquiet sleep in the sling, reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. During his next nap (walking again but this time with the pushchair) I called the guys at work, for the first time in several weeks. I kind of miss it but it feels very distant, almost unreal.
Today’s meals for Adrian: pear and broccoli. Both made a good and proper mess. He attacked the broccoli with great intensity, as if that was what he’d been waiting for all his life. I do think I actually saw him swallow some of it, too.
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