"Black Swan Green," David Mitchell's fourth novel concerning a year in the life of 13-year-old Jason Taylor, reads like a first novel with its autobiographical backdrop and references to 1980s British pop culture, advertisements and brands. "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" returns Mitchell to Japan, setting for "number9dream" and for the first chapters of "Ghostwritten."
However, this Japan is over 200 years old and the location is not postmodern Tokyo but the artificial island of Dejima, home to Dutch traders in Nagasaki Bay during the Kansei, Kyowa and Bunka eras (1789-1817).
Whereas Mitchell's novels usually span centuries, moving from the past into the future, and contain separate yet linked narratives with multiple characters, "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet," anchored in a set time and geographically contained in Nagasaki, is a more straightforward historical novel with a narrative centered on actual events — the British ship HMS Phoebus is based on the HMS Phaeton episode of 1808 — with some characters drawn from biographical sources.