
In his fifth lucid and allusive literary endeavor, David Mitchell temporarily suspends his trademark structural inventiveness to display his considerable abilities in the more traditional form of the historical novel, as he inhabits the 18th-century Japanese island of Dejima, where a tiny community of Dutch traders represented the only contact between Japan and the rest of the world. One of the Dutch sojourned on Dejima is Jacob de Zoet, who has naively accepted his alienated post in order