The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
David Mitchell
Fiction
Random House
Hardcover - 479 Pages
$26.00
Want something entirely original in the historical fiction genre - and lyical to boot? The novel centers on a love story between a European man and Japanese woman at the turn of the 18th Century in Edo-era Japan. The relationship is something of a metaphor for the larger scope of the emerging encounter between an insular, feudal Japan and a Europe of Enlightenment ideas and commercial corruption. Jacob de Zoet is an uptight young Dutch bookkeeper; Miss Aibagawa is a beautiful, but scarred, Japanese midwife. The rest is history!