Full Circle

A few weeks ago I saw David M*tchell read from his new book at a bookstore in the West Village. The book, reviewed extensively in pretty much every major literary publication currently on my coffee table, is about Dutch traders on the Japanese island of Dejima in the 1800s, the closest that the closed nation would allow foreigners to approach.

At the reading, he said many beautiful things. This is one of them:

Over the course of the novel, the main character, Jacob, falls in love with a Japanese woman, Orito. Their courtship includes impromptu vocabulary lessons in one another's tongues. "What does Jacob mean in Dutch?" "What do you call this flower?" Etc. At one point, Jacob asks Orito the Japanese word for persimmon -- "kaki," she tells him. They share one, in a luscious passage of flesh-bright prose.

Here Mitchell paused from his reading. "You know," he said, and I'm paraphrasing, "I give readings in the Netherlands and people speak such good English there they can follow me without a problem. But when I got to that passage, I wanted to make sure it was clear, so I asked what the Dutch word for persimmon was. It's 'kaki.'"

Had his novel been written in the native language of its characters, Victorian-era Dutch, he would have known that already. But instead, this funny coincidence is in fact no coincidence at all: the word is a trace of the trade that he was writing about all along.