The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Nagasaki, 1799. Jacob de Zoet arrives at Dejima as a junior clerk for the Dutch East India Company, charged with helping to expose fraud at a trading post where Europeans are confined to a small artificial island and every exchange with Japan is regulated through interpreters and officials. His rigid honesty isolates him from corrupt colleagues, while his encounter with Orito Aibagawa, a gifted Japanese midwife studying Dutch medicine, draws him into a relationship constrained by religion, status and the laws separating the two communities.

When Orito is taken to a remote mountain shrine, the interpreter Ogawa Uzaemon attempts a rescue and Jacob must decide how far integrity can survive within systems built on secrecy and coercion. The later confrontation with a British warship transforms commercial intrigue into an international crisis echoing the Phaeton Incident of 1808. Through the decline of the Dutch East India Company, Rangaku scholarship and the tightly controlled world of Tokugawa Nagasaki, the novel explores translation, faith, scientific exchange and the unequal bargains through which cultures meet.