Kobe University Repository : Kernel Dejima as an Imaginary Homeland : The Imag(i)nation of Gaijin in David タイトル Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet(想像の祖国として Title の出島 : デイヴィッド・ミッチェル『ヤコブ・デズートの千の秋』に おけるガイジン／外人の（イマジ）ネーション) 著者 Wang, Ching-Chih Author(s) 掲載誌・巻号・ページ 海港都市研究,8:41-59 Citation 刊行日 2013-03 Issue date 資源タイプ Departmental Bulletin Paper / 紀要論文 Resource Type 版区分 publisher Resource Version 権利 Rights DOI JaLCDOI 10.24546/81004813 URL http://www.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/handle_kernel/81004813 PDF issue: 2021-10-04 41 Dejima as an Imaginary Homeland The Imag(i)nation of Gaijin in David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet Ching-Chih WANG The portraits of strangers have been widely and strategically re-examined by scholars of contemporary British fictions who focus on the anxieties of alienation that the outsiders would encounter in the era of uncertainty. By suggesting David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) as a text that deals with imaginations of the uncertain, I argue that the images and imaginations of gaijin (the alien) described by Mitchell in his creation of the Dutch colonizers of Dejima, a protruding and secluded artificial island offshore the Nagasaki harbor,1 are reflections of his writing as a gaijin in Japan. They also lay bare the outsiders’ ignoration of the strangeness implied in their construction of the imaginary homeland. Alienated as a gaijin on Dejima, Jacob de Zoet, a young Dutch officer working for the Dutch East Indies Company (De Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, the VOC), perceives the world not through his eyes but through his imaginations. It first appears that he enters into a bewilderment of cultural dislocation and miscommunication. Such mis-conceptualization and alienation, however, unbolt the padlock of the uncommunicative and paradoxically resolve the mysteries of his-story (his story and history) as a gaijin on an isolated island designed to keep the Westerners at bay. How can the outcast Dutch colonizer imagine the alien nation, Dejima, as his homeland, and eventually redeem his sense of alienation? In addition to the analysis of gaijin’s image and his imagined nation, the “imag(i)nation” I coin in this paper, I would also explore the influence of the Dutch Learning on the secluded Japan during the turn of the eighteenth century. Exercised in the name of the shougun ( 将軍 ), Japan locks herself up and the Dutch study becomes the only means she learns about the world. How can the foreign Rangaku ( 蘭学 , the Dutch Learning) assist the midwife, Orito, to transform from “the disfigured damsel, spurned by her own race” (Mitchell, TAJZ 62) to a bridge that brings the pre-modern Japan “from ignoration, . to knowledge”? (Mitchell, TAJZ 1 Dejima was constructed in the shape of a fan because, as legend had it, when the shogun was asked to decide its formation, he had “snapped open his fan with a turn of his wrist” (Goodman 19). The name Dejima means “Fore Island,” which aptly describes its position before the town of Nagasaki. 42 海港都市研究 69, emphasis original)?2 Why is her projecting Dejima as an imaginary homeland apposite to her “goal in life” (Mitchell, TAJZ 69)? Other than the stranger’s imaginary homeland, the differentiated colonial control executed on Dejima will also be tackled in the examination of gaijin’s failure to understand the reality. Distinct from the other imperialists who are usually soldiers or missionaries when participating in colonial expansions, the Dutch colonizers in Japan are traders, scholars, or physicians. To what extent do they make a contrast to those who claim unauthorized sovereignty over the colony? How do the Dutch colonizers devise policies to control over the so-called uncivilized people? In like manner, the Japanese middlemen described in the novel do not directly engage in colonial exploitations, but they cunningly choose to keep their heads down when facing the huge profits the Dutch colonizers bring along through usurpations of their colonies. Another go-between character in Mitchell’s Dejima story is the Dutch language translator, Sôzaemon Ogawa. Why is Dejima a place where his imagination of the gaijin becomes substantialized? In what sense does his study of the Dutch provide great “solace”? (Mitchell, TAJZ 86) How does Rangaku assist in unlocking the chained society? From which aspect can David Mitchell’s intervention in and invention of history configurate a paradigm for the study of contemporary British fictions ? Writing as a gaijin David Mitchell was once an alien sojourned in Hiroshima in his mid twenties, but his early life in the town of Malvern in Worcestershire, England, would never have anything to do with alienation because it was “white, straight, and middle-class,” as he told Adam Begley in 2012 (Begley). After exposing himself in a foreign land for nine years, Mitchell published his first novel, Ghostwritten (1999). It was highly praised by its fabrication of an “intricately assembled Fabergé egg,” where “a daisy chain of characters” wander through every time zone to go across “the gamut of individual experience” (Mendelsohn). This ambitious and weighty debut book won him the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best work of literature by a British or Commonwealth author thirty-five or younger. He was also short-listed for the Man Booker Prize for his second novel, Number9Dream (2001), and his third, Cloud Atlas (2004). In 2003, Granta acclaimed him one of the best young 2 The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet will hereafter be abbreviated as TAJZ when referred in parentheses. Dejima as an Imaginary Homeland 43 British novelists, while Time magazine, following the publication of his fourth novel, Black Swan Green (2006), honored him as the only literary novelist in their 2007 list of the one hundred most influential people in the world. Unlike the British Asian author Kazuo Ishiguro, who writes novels to “recreate” a Japan that can “put together” all his memories of Japan before they fade away (Ishiguro and Oe 110), David Mitchell commits to writing stories about Japan to tackle the sense of alienation he experienced in Japan. In an author essay he writes for the publisher, Random House, Mitchell reveals such anxiety and says: “In Japan, I am . an alien amongst natives” because Japan is a “classic club society” in which he has to “kiss [his] sense of social belonging goodbye” (“Japan and My Writing”). Different from the “Mission” countries that define “foreignness” by behavior, the “Club” countries define foreignness by one’s “lineage or passport.” It makes no significant difference for “what you do, how well you learn the language, . you are foreign and always will be.” On the contrary, in Mission countries, as a foreigner acts “like a native, and as far as other natives are concerned,” he eventually has “as much right to be there as [the natives] do” (“Japan and My Writing”). It is this lack of belonging that urges him to start his writing career: I lack a sense of citizenship in the real world, and in some ways, commitment to it. To compensate, I stake out a life in the country called writing. I don’t mean the publishing world: I mean a mental state . , where characters and plots in the head achieve the solidity of people and lives outside the head. Of course, other writers not living in Japan, and many non-writers, not to mention psychotics, do the same. But for me, my ability to compound inner-skull reality is a direct result of my life away from where I “belong.” To date, many of my characters show the same trait. (“Japan and My Writing”) Writing not only grants him compensation for sense of alienation, it also awards him with “fulfillment.” As he tells Sam Bradford, What will always be true is that you write because it’s fulfilling, and right now part of the fulfillment is the multiplicity of voices. The buzz and satisfaction of expressing something, not only hopefully reasonably well, but in one character’s voice reasonably well. That’s very very fulfilling. (Bradford) 44 海港都市研究 For the gaijin writer David Mitchell, his intention to create “plurality of lenses” for “a necessary forcing of the limits of the imagination” (Finbow) cannot be understood if he puts himself and his works outside the context of Japan because Japan is a “built-up” place bombarded with signs and codes that are “largely” strange to him (Mitchell, “Japan and My Writing”). He would “understand less” if he tries to understand more. It is for such perplexity Mitchell thinks that for “foreigners, the casing of the human condition sometimes turns transparent, like a see-through Swatch” (“Japan and My Writing”). The transparent cover of a Swatch seemingly displays every part of the watch, but for the uninitiated strangers, the casing of the transparent watch illuminates nothing but their ignoration of how the machine proceeds to function in reality. To put Mitchell’s words succinctly, a “see-through Swatch” covers a stranger’s inability to understand; it also uncovers the foreignness implied in his imagination of the real world. David Mitchell in several occasions has mentioned about how Japanese arts have influenced his writing strategies. His conceptualization of “less is more,” for example, is developed by the allusive Haiku, while the ending of Ghostwritten is “influenced directly by the ending of Mishima’s problematic masterpiece, The Sea of Fertility (“Japan and My Writing”). Likewise, Haruki Murakami’s novels fascinate him, especially The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, because they show him “how literature can marry popular culture to cook up humour and metaphor” while indicating tactics for a stranger to manage sense of alienation as he is “overly impressionable” to the world around him (Mitchell, “Japan and My Writing”).