Imagine an empire that has kept the world away from it for a century and a half. Everyone is forbidden to leave, foreigners are excluded, their religions are prohibited, and their ideas are treated with deep suspicion.

However, there is a peculiar crack in this fortress-state: an artificially fortified island connected to a port of the country, manned by a handful of European merchants. And, although the gateway to the mainland is locked, it cannot prevent minds - or hearts - from mingling.

The nation is Japan at the intersection of two centuries (18th-19th), the port is Nagasaki, and the island is Dejima. Here unfolds this panoramic, dense novel by David Mitchell. And here, a newly arrived Dutch clerk, Jacob de Zoet, becomes entangled in a dark adventure of duplicity, love, guilt, faith, and murder... But at the same time, without himself or his compatriots knowing it, the axis of global power is turning...

In this story of integrity and corruption, passion and power, the key is control: of wealth, of thought, even of death.