Best read this year

The cover of this book caught my eye. I checked out the review at the back and they were all good and by respectable publications. You can only rely so much on reviews but this is how I rely on them. At the beginning, the book was about the coming and goings of Jacob De Zoet who worked for a Dutch trading company. He was stationed in Dejima, a man-made island of the coast of Nagasaki in a time Japan was ruled by the shoguns and was mostly closed to the world.
Trade was lucatrive, but limited. The Dutch traders had to trade carefully, balancing between their own need to pursue profit and ensuring they do not offend the Japanese. This doesn’t seem like the type of book I read at all and the topic might not even seem appealing to the regular person but this is where the author uses his in-depth research, ingenuity and imagination to recreate a period and industry seldom seen in bestsellers.
The beginning was more about the daily affairs of the traders, the chapters were short. The style of writing was unusual and it really seemed the book was going to be just about trade. But then things started to become more interesting, it became more intriguing. During his stay in Dejima, Jacob met a lot of people but he was good friends with Dr Marinus. Marinus teaches medicine to a group of students and one of his students is Aibagawa Aiko, a local.
When she is suddenly sent to a monastery after her father’s death, the story takes a different turn. Even the style of the writing changes. In the beginning, the writing was kind of odd and quirky but after that it becomes like a mystery or a thriller. The main character himself, shows different traits of himself and starts to evolve. From a story about trade, it becomes a mystery, love story and coming-of-age story all rolled into one. It’s like the writer mixed in three of genres of writing in one book. From there onwards, I could not put the book down. By the time I reached the end, I thought it was the most brilliant book I’ve ever read.

There are many good lines in the book, but this one is my favourite:

“An inch away is a Go clam shell-stone, perfect and smoothed...
...a black butterfly lands on the White stone, and unfolds its wings.”


Later on, I discovered that the book is categorised under literature. Hah! Literature, the genre I usually stay away from. I always thought I couldn’t understand literature books. Either this book is really good or I like literature :P