Almost surreptitiously and with great literary economy, Mitchell has delivered many of the elements that will shape the body of this tale as it grows: The midwife, a scholar’s daughter named Orito Aibagawa, is a major character whose reward by the Magistrate (also a major character) will, as an unintended consequence, thrust her into contact with the young Dutch clerk Jacob de Zoet (newly arrived on the ship, he is the central protagonist and the character from whom the novel’s title derives).
Only when Magistrate Shiroyama’s deputy defies his orders, allowing the doctor to utilize his forceps, is the bleakest outcome avoided. Amid the concubine’s labor, a celebration can be heard in surrounding Nagasaki, heralding the safe arrival of a ship in service of the Dutch East Indies Company, a closely controlled trading partner whose presence represents economic health for the greater community. Luckily, the extraordinary midwife recognizes the unusual breech position of the fetus from an engraving in a Dutch medical text her father had been translating from “that enlightened and barbaric realm, Europe.”įor long moments, this appears to be an attempt to extract the stillborn son of a Magistrate, the shogun’s representative and therefore the supreme local power before whom all others bow. The birth takes place in the house of a concubine in Japan during its Edo Period of forced isolation, when Christianity was banned, and a western-influenced Japanese doctor is forced to instruct a midwife from behind a curtain - by order, he is not allowed to witness the event or touch the woman. It is not a virginal birth but a naturally occurring one in which poor circumstances have a chokehold on the lives of the birthing mother and her child.
The British writer David Mitchell’s new novel “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” opens with a miraculous birth, probably a knowing and slightly subversive wink at Christian beliefs, since the religion will be at issue in the pages to follow.
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