This is a memoir of a man in charge of a Dutch trading outpost in Japan in the early 1800s when the Dutch were the only Westerners allowed into that island nation by the all-powerful Shogun. As such, you might think that it would just be an ultimately-tiresome recitation of deals made, export materials dispatched, imports received and sold to Japanese, etc. But the saving grace of this memoir is a huge one: the man writing it is a multi-faceted person, a clever and even manipulative wheeler-dealer when that's what's required of him, but also a good and sensitive reporter of the many oddities (to a Westerner) of Japanese life of that time. For example, there are many points in the book where he has to mention seppuku, the famous, traditional Japanese practice of slitting their bellies open (and invariably dying!) practiced by the Japanese "knightly" class who by the time of this book are almost never called on to go to war anymore, but are routinely called upon to be administrators, large and small, of the nation. The impact on their style of administration of the fact that that practice was still alive and well among those one-time warriors is multifarious and not what you would expect.
The above is just the most sensational of the subjects covered in this memoir. The Dutch writer describes many aspects of Japanese life which were then about as profoundly different from the European life the writer knew as is possible to imagine. I believe that any Western Japan-fan will like this book a lot, as I did, for one simple reason: Even today, Japan's culture is so different from that of the West that an habitual reader of manga and anime will often find himself asking, "What's going on here, really?" This narration of an early, and long (18 year) encounter of a Western man with traditional Japanese culture conveys that very same sense of mystery. To some degree, the old description of the Japanese and their way of life as "inscrutable" was not far from the truth.
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