David Mitchell

Audio

Transcript

Ramona Koval: David Mitchell joins us from his home in County Cork in Ireland. David Mitchell, welcome to The Book Show and it's good to have you on again.

David Mitchell: Thank you very much, Ramona, it's great to be here.

Ramona Koval: Now, how did you come across this story, because it's not well known.

David Mitchell: Originally, literally, I stumbled across it. I was twenty... 25 years old, backpacking in the west of Japan, Christmas 1994. I went to Nagasaki, as usual had no money and was trying to find a cheap lunch in Chinatown, but I couldn't read the street signs very well 'cos I couldn't read any Kanji at that point, and I got off at the wrong stop. And there is a stop called Dejima, which meant nothing to me but I thought it was in the middle of Chinatown but it wasn't. And I just walked around for a while, feeling hungry, but found by accident three or four buildings that were obviously from a much earlier historical period, although Nagasaki being Nagasaki, they were obviously reconstructions. And while that was what was then the Dejima Museum—there wasn't much to it in 1994, but it's since been reconstructed. And something in me thought... I wasn't a published writer then, hadn't even finished my first manuscript, but something in me knew that one day I'd like to write a book about it, just because of the historical oddities of the place and its uniqueness as a, well, what I think of as a cultural cat-flap between Japan and the west. And 16 years later, here we are!

Ramona Koval: Here we are! And here we are with your book, which you begin with a gut-wrenching description of a woman in labour and the difficulties faced at this moment, at the end of the eighteenth century, by the baby's presentation. One arm emerges from the mother, rather than the head. Do you think of this as sort of symbolic of this cat-flap, as well? This idea, this tiny bridge, connecting us from pre-birth to life on earth? Is that what Dejima was like? Is that why you started with this scene?

David Mitchell: I've got a glorious image. I started really I guess for a less literary reason. Yes and no. A birth is a good place to start. Dickens did it often and you can't go too far wrong. I just wanted to show how knowledge literally can not only improve lives; it can actually make life happen. Without the Enlightenment texts, especially medical ones, that were beginning to filter into Japan through Dejima, that baby wouldn't have lived. It's just because my main female character, Orito, has (but she's the daughter of doctor), it's just because she's mixed in those circles and has seen those engravings, those books, that are foundation stones of what we now call obstetrics. Just because she's seen that she knows where to put her hands, she knows what forceps are, she knows how to bring it out. Had she not seen those pictures—and one of those pictures is reproduced on third page or so—had she not seen that picture, that baby wouldn't have happened, and all of the events that get set into motion because of the baby, who happens to be the only male heir of the most powerful man in Nagasaki, the magistrate. She's seen that picture, she's able to bring the baby out and the baby can live. So that's really why it starts the way it does. That, and me being very anxious not to have a female protagonist who is a geisha, because books written by tallish blond westerners about Japan, they're full of geisha, and I really wanted to keep them out of mine.

Ramona Koval: Yes. Orita Aibagawa, this midwife who's studying surgery, she's a woman with a blemish on her face, she was burned, as a child I suppose. And she's contrary to the western image of the compliant Asian woman with a high voice. On the one hand, she's not perfect, her face isn't perfect; but she's a very strong character, isn't she?

David Mitchell: Yeah, she needs to be in view of... the poor woman, but yes, she is. It was the eighteenth century—more blood, more violence, less guarantee, less security that everything was going to be OK in the end. And I think in a way just in the interests of being historically accurate, authentic, if you're writing something set in the eighteenth century, people will need to be tough and endure and in some cases even thrive on the kind of life that would send you and me into a screaming nervous breakdown in two weeks, I think.

Ramona Koval: The unusual presentation at the birth isn't the only sort of medical intricacy you describe in the book. You've got a kidney stone operation that one bloke has to do...

David Mitchell: Oh, I'm glad you liked that. Thank you.

Ramona Koval: Oh, yes, I liked that [laughs]. I mean, they are very graphic...
David Mitchell: Well, no anaesthetic, no anaesthetic.

Ramona Koval: I know, I know!

David Mitchell: We think they're tough things to read, but imagine! Imagine someone cuts open your bladder with no anaesthetic and plucks out a big stone. I mean it's, ah... no idea of how bacteria works, so these would have been done with same uncleaned knives that the surgeon used for everything else. So you'd be having other people's blood and pus and urine just going straight into your bloodstream. It's amazing any of us are here, really.

I know when we think about history it tends to be the admirals and the generals who get the glory, but it's these rather unsung medical people who worked out how to keep many more of us alive than otherwise would have survived those times. They are literally why we're here, because without them either us, but more likely one of our ancestors, would have died and stopped the bloodline and then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Ramona Koval: How do you prepare for those sorts of scenes? What kind of research did you do for that... those two operations I suppose, or the birth—the strange presentation—and the kidney stones?

David Mitchell: Um, the strange presentation one was the hardest, the prolapse of the arm. I went back to texts written by the two Scottish doctors who really began to think seriously about how we can save these awkwardly presenting children: William Smiley and John Hunter. And I pieced it together from their descriptions of operations that had gone wrong and the pictures. So in a way I was treading in Orito's footsteps, who was treading in Dr William Smiley's footsteps. Scots—for some reason they were onto this really early, and many of these medical heroes came out Edinburgh rather than London or Paris or anywhere else. The kidney stone one, luckily there's a few more descriptions in contemporary accounts, perhaps, actually, because they affected men and so it's the man-flu...

Ramona Koval: ...and obviously so much more painful than any woman would have felt...

David Mitchell: Oh, of course, obviously [laughing]. But they wrote more and had better access to the historical record. There's also a very good account in another historical novelist called Neal Stephenson, who has a fantastic scene with a kidney stone operation. And I'm afraid I went shoplifting through all of these various sources to do my own, but I think it's what everyone does really.

Ramona Koval: Well, we're giving the impression that this a litany of medical operations, but that's completely not true. We also have to admire your economic history of the Dutch East India Company and the relationship of this company with Japan. Tell me about this extraordinary company.

David Mitchell: The Dutch are pretty amazing people as well as the Scottish. Nature gave nothing but mud really, and so they had to work out new ways of making money. And in doing so they invented the windmill to drain land and reclaim it—hydro engineering—um, the stock exchange, the futures market—all these things are Dutch inventions. And the first great multinational company in the world, really, the Dutch East Indies Company. The state didn't have... it wasn't the state's business in the seventeenth century to go creating large companies in and of itself, so it would grant charters to businessmen and investors to set companies up and give them the monopoly rights. It would obviously skim off the tax and often—then as now—either politicians making the decisions would also have an economic interest as investors in the company. But the Dutch East Indies Company was, for a long time, the largest not only commercial organisation, but organisation of any type in the world, and it allowed this small little muddy country in northwest Europe to establish an empire without also having to fund the Roman army or something of that size.

They had a large, vast network of trading posts—they called them factories—throughout Asia: India, what we now call Malaysia, Indonesia (what was then Java), and they had the one trading concession in Japan, as you mentioned in your introduction. For historical reasons the Japanese believed they could trust them in a way that they couldn't trust the Spanish and the Portuguese, not to try and spread Christianity and rock the boat that they were quite happy with. There weren't enough Dutch people to actually man the Dutch East Indies Company, so they'd also recruit from either mostly Protestant European countries, just as a labour source to man their empire, to man the trading posts, which by now was in Dejima to be a much more multinational place—it's run by the Dutch, but there were people from other countries there as well.

It was a risky business going out east, had about a four in ten chance of succumbing to malaria or some other equally non-understood disease within a few weeks of arriving in Java. And so only people who had really nothing to lose already were willing to take this gamble. If you were fairly middle class, prosperous, well-to-do in the Netherlands, then there was no reason for you to risk all of that, but if you were from the working classes then it was your best hope of social mobility, really.

Ramona Koval: And that's the situation for your character, Jacob De Zoet, who goes off... well, he's very sweet on a girl at home, but he goes off to make his fortune, I suppose, and to prove himself. But he falls in love with the woman we spoke about before, Orito, and even though he's promised to somebody else. And I wonder whether you'd read for us a section of the book and describe what happens just before we hear this section.

David Mitchell: Sure. This is a short scene that occurs in the book after my second—I learnt this phrase in Los Angeles the other week, of all places—after the second cute-meet, where Jason and Orito have met in the garden.

Ramona Koval: What's a cute-meet? Is that some...?

David Mitchell: It's such a useful word! It's that inevitable scene you get in a film where the love interests, or the characters who'll be having a relationship later on in the film, meet for the first time. The name of that scene is a cute-meet.

Ramona Koval: That's where they rush, they bang into each other on the campus and they drop their books and they both pick them up...

David Mitchell: That's right, that's right, that's right. Well, that's the cute-meet. Isn't that a useful term, Ramona?

Ramona Koval: Well, I'm not sure how useful it will be for me, but clearly it's useful for you. [Laughter.] So they've had a cute-meet already, haven't they?

David Mitchell: Yeah, they've had one. They've just had cute-meet number two or three, I think, although I try to make them as unconventional as possible, so no dropped books here, thank you very much! However, she has given him a persimmon, she's... I don't know if you know what that is in Australia?

Ramona Koval: We have... yeah we do know what persimmons are.

David Mitchell: Great. Great. Many English readers no longer know, but of course it's a fruit that's very popular in Japan. And she's given him one of these fruits and later on in the day he takes it out of his pocket.

[David Mitchell reads excerpt from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: from 'Before the evening muster, Jacob climbs the Watchtower and takes out the persimmon from his jacket pocket...' to '...Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us, at the speed of days and nights, and we like to call it "Love".']

Ramona Koval: And that's David Mitchell reading from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, here on The Book Show on ABC Radio National with me, Ramona Koval.

So, a couple of things about that, David. Of course it brings to mind D.H. Lawrence and him writing about the fig.

David Mitchell: Oh yeah...

Ramona Koval: Don't you think?

David Mitchell: Ah well, ah, far be it for me to elevate myself into such company...

Ramona Koval: It's a very sexy reading, though, isn't it?

David Mitchell: Ah, there's something about food, isn't there, Ramona, don't you think?

Ramona Koval: Yeah I do, and the way you write about it there certainly is. And then I had this vision of you with a whole lot of persimmons just eating them time and time again, just trying to get exactly the taste and exactly the image. Is that what you did?

David Mitchell: Yes, I did, yeah. They're a completely different fruit depending at what stage of ripeness you get them, but if you get a really good one, then you can actually wax pretty rhapsodical about them, pretty easily, that they are an amazing fruit. John Keats is very good on fruit as well. He knew his way around fruit really well. So I had some good models to aim high at.

Ramona Koval: Well, but so much about this book... I mean, like all of your work, it's about many, many things, and so much here is about translation, about the sound of the Dutch and the Japanese, about mispronunciation, about cultural misunderstandings too, which is really mind-blowing, because you're writing it in English. For example, I think somebody says 'horse' and somebody misinterprets that as 'whore'—you know, as in 'prostitute'—and then I'm thinking...

David Mitchell: Oh, yeah, that's the first cute-meet...

Ramona Koval: That's the first cute-meet, that's right. But they're supposed to be speaking Dutch of course, aren't they?

David Mitchell: Mm.

Ramona Koval: Except that you've made the confusion an English confusion.

David Mitchell: Um, yeah. Yeah, that's true, you've caught me out there, actually...

Ramona Koval: No, no, no. I'm sure you did it on purpose.

David Mitchell: Um, well, these are problems that I could bequeath to my Dutch translators; they had to make the same problems in real Dutch, which they extracted revenge upon me for by teasing me about how much more authentic their Dutch translation is than the English original. And believe me, they got their money's worth out of that joke.

Yeah it's... as I said earlier, I was very drawn to this theme and to this time and place—Dejima. Once I started, however, or to be precise, about a year into having begun, I realised that I might have made an awful mistake. Dejima in the first case was a place specifically designed to stop things like cute-meets ever happening. The Japanese Tokugawa state was a totalitarian state and they... and every third person on Dejima was a spy, whose job was to stamp out the unexpected and report on infringements of the numerous rules. So I kind of was in this situation where I was trying to write a novel in a place that was specifically designed to stop novel-like episodes happening.

Then in the second case: language. I realised that actually... and contemporary accounts are full of complaints of Japanese interpreters not being able to speak Dutch at all, really. What were they going to speak to each other in? What language? And I tried to fix it by having rather implausible subplots, where some of the interpreters had smuggled themselves out and gone to Batavia and had learnt Dutch really well, but, nah, that wasn't going to wash, was it? [Laughs.] Only when I actually realised, 'Hang on, you can turn this problem into an asset, by bringing it into the foreground instead of trying to hide it in the background.' And yeah, indeed, they don't understand each other very well, there's lots of misunderstandings, but, ah, but having spent a number of years in Japan trying to master the language without resounding success, it has to be said, I thought that actually all of these cultural misunderstandings could actually be quite a useful and interesting and relevant theme to allow to surface in the novel in its own right.

Ramona Koval: Yes. There's a part... somebody says late in the book, 'A story must move and misfortune is motion.' As you said just then about the problem of having your story that you've set up where nobody can get in and out of it really and there's not much opportunity for sort of adventures, your people can't move into each other's society, but you create this adventure in your book, your story moves and misfortune is motion and you certainly get a lot of motion out of it, because...

David Mitchell: I think it's... I've been thinking about this a bit, about what originality might be, and I suspect that originality isn't something that comes from the answer, it's actually something in the question. So the more problems, the tighter the straitjacket and the weirder the straitjacket, the more original has to be the act of escapology to get out of it. So I've found this in writing quite a lot. A good place to start is actually to think about a book that isn't going to be that easy to write and I think whatever originality is, it's something to do with this. But I interrupted you, apologies for that.

Ramona Koval: No, no. That's very interesting, because you certainly set yourself up a problem, don't you? The language, the little cat-flap between the two cultures, the people who fall in love, which is very difficult at the time, because it's not approved of great big Dutchmen and ladies of... I suppose of having a difficult time, educated ladies.

David Mitchell: Yeah, yeah...

Ramona Koval: And you get... But what you do is you get Orito kidnapped and taken to a nunnery. Now I've met you, David, we met in Wellington, and you're a very nice person. But how did you imagine this terrible nunnery of rape and baby-farming and baby murder. What have you been thinking about?

David Mitchell: It's all on the surface, Ramona, my niceness. Deep down I'm a monster, as anyone who knows me can happily testify. Ah, what was I thinking? Well, it's my job to think of these things, I suppose. What motivates your darker... what motivates your more villainous characters is something that any maker of narrative—you know, a filmmaker or a novelist or a dramatist as well—it's really quite hard to motivate your villains without them turning into pastiche, spoof Dr Evil kind of villains. You need to think of something that all of us would be tempted by, and if the answer is something as banal as to get a particular woman (or man), or to get a million dollars, then of course the fiction just falls flat at that point. But if it's something you and I could be offered—some way of cheating death for a long, long time and to prolong our life spans by doing something ethically unacceptable most certainly, then at least I think the person making the offer, however unacceptable it might be, at least the person would capture our attention. And these sort of incremental rationalisations you can make— 'Well, it's not that bad.' 'Well, these lives wouldn't exist if I hadn't engineered them into being in the first place,' et cetera, et cetera—these little steps: if you frame villains' motivation in this way, then I think they become more interesting and less two-dimensional.

Ramona Koval: Well, David Mitchell, it's been a pleasure speaking with you again.

David Mitchell: Oh, thank you very much, Ramona, it's been great speaking with you too.

Ramona Koval: And the book we've been talking about is called The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and it's published by Sceptre Books.

David Mitchell http://www.thousandautumns.com/

Publications

Title: The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Author: David Mitchell

Publisher: Sceptre Books