The following Sunday, Jacob listens to a sermon in Domburg Church amongst a congregation of familiar faces as aged as his own. He pays his respects at the graves of his mother, father and uncle, but declines the new pastor’s invitation to dine at the parsonage. He rides to Middelburg for meetings with the directors of trading houses and import companies. Positions are proposed, decisions taken, contracts signed, and Jacob is inducted into the Freemasons’ Lodge. By tulip-time and Whitsuntide, he emerges from a church arm in arm with the stolid daughter of an associate. The confetti reminds Jacob of the cherry blossoms in Miyako. That Mrs de Zoet is half her husband’s age provokes no disapproval – her youth is an equitable exchange for his money. Man and wife find one another’s company agreeable; for most of the time; or certainly, for some of it; during the earlier years of their marriage, at least. He intends to publish his memoirs about his years as Chief Resident in Japan, but somehow life always conspires to rob him of the time. Jacob turns fifty. He is elected on to the council of Middelburg. Jacob turns sixty, and his memoirs are still unwritten. His copper hair loses its burnish, his face sags and his hairline retreats until it resembles an elderly samurai’s shaven pate. A rising artist who paints his portrait wonders at his air of melancholic distance, but exorcises the ghost of absence from the finished painting. One day Jacob bequeaths the de Zoet Psalter to his eldest son – not Yûan, who predeceased him, but his eldest Dutch son, a conscientious boy quite untroubled by curiosity about life beyond Zeeland. Late October or early November brings a gusty twilight. The day has stripped the elms and sycamores of their last leaves, and the lamplighter is making his rounds as Jacob’s family lines the patriarch’s bedside. Middelburg’s best doctor wears a grave demeanour, but he is satisfied that everything was done for his patient during the short but lucrative illness, and that he will be home in time for supper. The clock’s pendulum catches the firelight, and in the rattle-breathed final moments of Jacob de Zoet, amber shadows in the far corner coagulate into a woman’s form.

She slips between the bigger, taller onlookers, unnoticed…

… and adjusts her headscarf, the better to hide her burn.

She places her cool palms on Jacob’s fever-glazed face.

Jacob sees himself, when he was young, in her narrow eyes.

Her lips touch the place between his eyebrows.

A well-waxed paper door slides open.

Acknowledgments

Firstly, the author wishes to thank the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Dutch Fund for Literature for providing an invaluable residency at NIAS for the first half-year of 2006.

Secondly, general thanks to Nadeem Aslam, Piet Baert, Manuel Berri, Evan Camfield, Wayson Choy, Harm Damsma, Walter Donohue, David Ebershoff, Johnny de Falbe, Tijs Goldschmidt, Tally Garner, Henry Jeffreys, Jonny Geller, Trish Kerr, Martin Kingston, Sharon Klein, Tania Kuteva, Hari Kunzru, Jynne Martin, Niek Miedema, Cees Nooteboom, Al Oliver, Hazel Orme, Lidewijde Paris, Jonathan Pegg, Noel Redding, Michael Schellenberg, Mike Shaw, Alan Spence, Doug Stewart, Ruth Tross, Professor Arjo Vanderjagt, Klaas and Gerrie de Vries, Carole Welch my patient editor, Professor Henk Wesselling, Dr George E van Zanen.

Thirdly, specific thanks to Kees ’t Hart, Ship Manager Robert Hovell of HM Frigate Unicorn in Dundee, Archivist Peter Sijnke of Middelburg and Professor Cynthia Vialle of the University of Leiden for answering a plethora of questions. Research sources were numerous, but this novel is indebted especially to the scholarship of Professor Timon Screech of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, Beatrice M. Bodart-Bailey’s annotated translation of Kaempfer’s Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed (as read by Captain Penhaligon) and Annick M. Doeff’s translation of her ancestor Hendrik Doeff’s memoir, Recollections of Japan.

Fourthly, thanks to the in-house illustrators Jenny and Stan Mitchell, and in-house translator of Japanese sources Keiko Yoshida.

Lastly, thanks to Lawrence Norfolk and his family.

David Mitchell