A maestro of modern literature

David Mitchell is a major figure in contemporary English literature. Two of his novels, number9dream and Cloud Atlas were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His latest book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, follows the adventures of a young Dutch clerk in 18th Century Edo Japan in a tale of clash of cultures, corruption, love and redemption set amongst a rich backdrop of an empire shut off from the rest of the world

What inspired you to write The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet?

Finding Dejima in 1994 during a trip to Nagasaki. I was 25, and not yet published, nor even that disciplined about teaching myself how to write, but when I came across the museum on the site of this partly reconstructed outpost of the Dutch East Indies Company, a sort of onboard Geiger-counter crackled, and I filled several pages of my notebook with notes. About 12 years and 4 novels later, it was time to bring ‘My Dejima Book’ into land.

Do you put in much of yourself or people you know into the characters you create?

Your own personality leaks into all your characters, no matter how you try to insulate them. Characters take DNA from other sources too – people you know, other fictional characters, but a lot from the creator. Jacob is probably more principled than I am, and his faith in God doesn’t come from me, and his rectitude is less flexible than my own: on the other hand, sure, he spent a long time living in Japan, not always understanding what he was seeing, and that's something I can certainly relate to.

One of the gems of the novel is the way you transformed the lack of common language between the Japanese and Dutch characters and their effort to learn each other’s language into a treasure trove of wordplay. What gave you the idea for all those witty puns and humorous ‘lost-in-translation’ moments?

With the wordplay in A Thousand Autumns, it was a necessity. I realized why nobody had ever done a Dejima-Nagasaki novel before: they (the Dutch and the Japanese) couldn’t really speak each other’s language very well! Leiden University had the daily journals that all the Dutch East India Company’s chief residents of Dejima kept and they were translated into English. You can actually read what the problems were on Dejima in 1798. One thing they complained a lot is that “None of these translators speak Dutch! This is hopeless!” Even if they can, they sometimes pretend not to speak Dutch. And it was technically illegal for the Dutch to try to learn Japanese, but they did because the Dutch were very ingenious linguists.

For the first manuscript I made these tortuous, difficult subplots where I thought it would be a good idea to have a couple of the [Japanese] translators smuggle themselves out and gone to Batavia [modern day Jakarta] to learn Dutch, and they learned it really well and they came back. So they at least they could speak Dutch, and I had the same really implausible ideas to increase the Dutch characters’ level of spoken Japanese. Just so I can avoid the problem. But of course readers are intelligent people and they can tell when a book has been bent out of shape because the author is trying to dig himself out of a hole!

Then I realized that this isn’t a problem at all, it’s actually an addition to the book. There is a sort of humour; there is a lot of potential in miscomprehension or incomprehension. So really it wasn’t an idea to use the wordplay of mutual language barriers, it was an act of surrender, I gave up trying to avoid the problem.

Which authors would you cite as having inspired or influenced you?

Always a tricky one, literary genealogy. The closer you look at the verb ‘inspire’, the foggier it gets, and ‘influence’ is a cause-effect relationship I'd rather leave to anyone willing to spend time thinking about it. To do it myself seems a bit impure. But for whatever it's worth, the books I read as a kid which made me ache to write in a similar vein were Ursula le Guin and Isaac Asimov, plus Susan Cooper, plus ‘The Sword in the Stone’, and some of Penelope Lively’s children's books. At Uni: Borges, Calvino, John Fowles, Angela Carter and Kundera all floated my boat. It was the 80s and unless you had POSTMODERNIST written on your face with a big marker pen, the doors at my university (Kent) wouldn't actually open.

In more recent years I try to keep my diet more omnivorous. I enjoy Sylvia Townshend Warner, Forster, the 19th century crew, Haruki Murakami, older-school Japanese writers like Juni’ichiro Tanizaki and Shusaku Endo. I never tire of re-reading Chekhov. He's just great. John Cheever, and an American poet James Wright. Primo Levi. Contemporaries whom I enjoy include Sarah Waters, Michel Faber, Hari Kunzru, Nadeem Aslam and AL Kennedy, but there are lots of others.

Outside literature, I'm working through the box-set of ‘The Wire’, too – it's a mighty achievement, and serves as a reminder to up my game. Oddly enough (or not) I think that Kate Bush's songs work like short stories and mood poems. I don't know if she'd like to be thought of as an honorary writer as well as a singular musician, but that's how I do think of her. Mustn't forget Kazuo Ishiguro, either. And I’ve just ‘discovered’ Anthony Trollope – ‘The Way We Live Now’ is a gorgeous great hairy thing.

Ursula le Guin and Asimov! Do you read much fantasy and sci-fi?

Not so much, these days, but I've digested a lot in my life, and as you know, once Science Fiction and Fantasy are absorbed into the body they are there for good. Neil Gaiman is a superlative writer, I think. Ballard really had something, too. I know ‘1984’ well and think about it often – perhaps the best-realized political novel in the canon. Mostly my SF is administered visually, in the form of box sets. I know my Borg from my Romulans, and understand why the joke “How many Doctor Who fans does it take to change a light-bulb? Only one, but he’s sure that the previous light-bulb is better than the present one" is funny. The borders between mainstream and genre fiction are getting hazy these days, and I think that's a good thing.

Do you plan all aspects of your the story before you start writing or do you ‘free write’ like Stephen King?

Not all aspects, no, because that would preclude the happy accidents, and happy accidents are often the best bits. If I ‘free wrote’ I'd be afraid that I'd always make the same decision at the same junction, and so my novels would come to resemble each other. I think of a novel as a road-trip, where I set off at point A, will end at Z, and mean to pass through points D, K, O, R and V, but how I get to and from those points is something I won't know until I'm en route. Furthermore ‘Z’ may look very different when I get there to how I anticipated if beforehand. Mmm. This metaphor's gotten out of hand.

Lastly, any words for aspiring authors?

The crucial stuff you need to know you can only know by writing. Get to it, and when you look back at what you've read and think, ‘Jeez, this is awful', know that that is progress. And avoid sentences that have ‘that that’ in them, though it is perfectly okay to begin a sentence with ‘And’ now and again.