A Japanese midwife, trained by a Dutch doctor who resides on the island, oversees the difficult breech birth of the baby of a local magistrate's wife. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, the fifth novel by British writer David Mitchell, opens on a deceptively optimistic note. That it was claustrophobic and constricted, a perspective further narrowed by language impediments, makes it all the richer a setting for a story of unstable, awkward "contact" between these once presumptive polar opposites of human societies. Nor were more than a handful of Japanese translators, medical students and courtesans let onto this "foreign" isle.ĭejima was a historic pinhole through which the West could glimpse the East, and vice versa. Fifteen or so Dutchmen resided there at any moment, and they were not even allowed to cross a footbridge into the city. From the 17th century through to the middle of the 19th, Dejima housed the only Westerners permitted inside cloistered, shogun-era Japan.
Half the size of a football field, its curved shape resembling a fan, the man-made island of Dejima once nestled in Nagasaki Harbour.
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