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[applause]
Randy Boyagoda: Thank you. I think it's safe to say that the excitement in the room this
evening, the buzz around this event in recent days comes from an obvious source. One writer's
brilliance of storytelling, his boldness of imagination, and his awe-inspiring literary
ambitions. That said, I'm admittedly surprised that you've all seen such greatness in only
my first novel.
[laughter]
RB: And the rather brief description of my second... And I'd like to take the rest of
this evening to tell you about my second novel, no. Instead of saying more about that, I myself
would much rather hear one of the world's greatest contemporary writers, David Mitchell,
discuss his latest feat of fiction, "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet". David Mitchell
was born in Lancashire, England and currently lives in West Cork, Ireland with his family.
Between these coordinates, he's lived elsewhere, perhaps most notably in Japan, the setting
of his new book and some of its predecessors. And indeed, it's on the evidence of Mitchell's
work so far, five novels, translated into some 19 languages that fellow writers, critics,
readers and prized juries alike continue to praise him for the brilliance and boldness
of his writing.
RB: Indeed, in 2007 Time Magazine named him the lone novelist to its list of the world's
100 most influential people. Mitchell's writing is so admired and indeed important because
it's technical wizardry and aesthetic showmanship for which he receives abundant praise are
always in service of compulsively readable storytelling and, at its best moments these
are his means of revealing, in strange places and stranger still ways, nothing less than
the universals of human experience. This evening we have the pleasure of hearing from David
Mitchell directly in discussion about the universals of human experience he reveals
in turn of the 18th century Japan, when a young devout Dutch clerk named Jacob de Zoet
arrives at Dejima, a man-made island off Nagasaki that is occupied by the Dutch East Indies
Company. Soon after arriving, Jacob finds himself immersed in a world of intrigue, corruption,
power politics, ritual, religion, and forbidden love, elements that intertwine and intensify
as Jacob's story and the story of Orito Aibagawa, the Japanese midwife he falls in love with,
develop. Before we sit down and have a conversation about this wondrous novel, we are very fortunate
that David has offered to give us a reading from it. And so without further ado, ladies
and gentlemen, David Mitchell.
[applause]
David Mitchell: Thank you very much indeed and thank you for sacrificing your beautiful,
beautiful evening to come and listen to me. And thank you for those wonderful introductions
as well. I've recorded them and when I'm having bad days I'll just replay them on my i-Pod.
And whenever I hear that Time Magazine 100 most influential people thing referenced,
I can still hear the laughter of scorn from both my mother and my wife.
[laughter]
DM: My wife helpfully pointed out that I'm not even the most influential person in the
house.
[laughter]
DM: There are four of us in our immediate household and I... We worked it out and I
have to admit she's right. I came in at number five after the washing machine, so it's really
nice that Time Magazine sort of gave me that accolade but talk about a reality gap. Anyway,
I'm going to do a brief reading from here. I think I'll just jump straight in and interrupt
myself as and when.
DM: Picking slugs from the cabbages with a pair of chopsticks, Jacob notices a ladybird
on his right hand. He makes a bridge for it with his left which the insect obligingly
crosses. Jacob repeats the exercise several times. "The ladybird believes," he thinks,
"she's on a momentous journey but she's going nowhere." He pictures an endless sequence
of bridges between skin covered islands over voids and wonders if an unseen force is playing
the same trick on him. Until a woman's voice dispels his reverie. "Mr. Da Zuto."
DM: Jacob removes his bamboo hat and stands up, and Ms. Aibagawa's face eclipses the sun.
"I beg pardon to disturb". Surprise, guilt, nervousness, Jacob feels many things. She
notices the ladybird on his thumb. "Tentomushi". And in his eagerness to comprehend, he mishears,
"Obentomushi." "Obentomushi is luncheon-box bug," she smiles. "This," she indicates ladybird,
"is a tentomushi." "Tentomushi," he says, and she nods like a pleased teacher. Her deep
blue summer kimono and white head scarf lend her a nun's air. They're not alone. The inevitable
guard stands by the garden gate. Guard, garden, they clash, don't they? Guard and garden.
Michael, we're gonna have to organize a product recall here, that says, "By the garden door,"
it's gonna have to be now. Some things like that, of course, lots you can get by reading,
but only if you read that one aloud could you ever notice it. So I would have had to
have read all 500 pages in my hut, just as God no, God, too late now.
[laughter]
DM: Jacob tries to ignore him, the guard. "It's ladybird in Dutch, gardener's friend."
"Anna would like you", he thinks, looking into her face. "Anna would like you." Anna
is his fiancee back at home in Zeeland. She's of a higher social class, so the prospective
father-in-law has said that he can only ask for her hand in marriage if he goes out east
for five years to earn his fortune, thinking that's a nice way to get rid of the young
guy. The gardener's friend, because ladybirds eat greenfly. Jacob raises his thumb to his
lips and blows. The ladybird flies all of three feet to the scarecrow's face. She adjusts
the scarecrow's hat as a wife might. "How you call him?" "It's a scarecrow in Dutch
to scare crows away, but this one's name is Robespierre.
[laughter]
DM: Warehouse is Warehouse Oak. I love this about the Dutch. They named their warehouses
the same way we name ships, and it's says something, one of the quite interesting about
the Dutch psyche, I think, a good thing about the Dutch psyche, of course. "Monkey is William
Pitt. Why scarecrow is Robespierre?" "It's because his head falls off when the wind changes."
[laughter]
DM: It's sort of a dark joke. "Joke is secret language," she frowns, "inside words." Jacob
decides against referring to the fan until she does. It would appear at least that she's
not offended or angered. The fan... This is just the third encounter they've had. The
first encounter, when they first met, he was working in a warehouse, she ran in after a
monkey that had run away with a poor sailor's amputated limb. It's a long story, it kind
of made sense at the time.
[laughter]
DM: It's really hard to get them to meet because Dejima is just sort of... This place, it's
a man-made island in Nagasaki harbour where, as you heard in the introduction, the Dutch
East Indiies Company were allowed to sort of operate a trading post. But potentially
a very rich place for a novel, I thought. But then, once I started writing, I also realized
it's an anti-plot device. The whole point was to prevent the unexpected. The Japanese
sort of isolated it at the far western end of the country. A very small island, I say
island and you might think of mountains and hills and fields. It was tiny, probably twice
the size of this hall... No, three times. Very, very small. Just one street, a few warehouses,
that was it. And certainly during the trading season when it was busy, every third or fourth
person was a spy.
DM: So how can you get them to meet? Some kind of a romantic interest, possibly budding
if not blossoming and, yeah, so that was the amputated limb plot. That was one answer.
Anyway, big digression. She left her fan there, he took the fan away and couldn't get her
face out of his head. So he disassembled the fan, he's something of an artist, and drew
her face on it and then reassembled it. And then managed to slip it to her on a later
encounter, on encounter number two, and he hasn't seen her since. So as he's talking
about the fan. If you're interested in the fan, then it appears later on in the book,
drawn by actually my own mum, which is a bit spinal tap, isn't it, to get your mum to do
the artwork but it didn't...
[laughter]
DM: It was great because it didn't cost me a bean, and it's great. "Mum, got a bit of
a favour to ask." She used to be an artist in her former life. Anyway, that's the fan.