The book is mostly about a clerk, working for the Dutch East India Company, who comes to Japan in 1799 to earn his fortune so that he can go back home to marry the girl he loves.

I say "mostly", because the plot does something wonky. Without giving too much away, this departure reinforces the idea that life is never what you expect--not just the events of the plot, but the departure from the expected for the reader of the fiction. (Does that count as metafiction?) Unfortunately, this little artifice caused me to become detached from the main character. By the time I got two-thirds of the way through the book, I really didn't care what happened to any of them--and that's sad, because there's some compassionate stuff in there. In hindsight, it almost felt like Mitchell had ideas for two novels, but just couldn't make them long enough, so he loosely combined them into one.

David Mitchell's narrative is fairly basic. He is neither verbose, nor spare--just adequate. However, he has two extremely annoying ticks that decreased the smooth flow of his prose. One, he overused ellipses. They're everywhere. Two, he carries the dialog in unusual places. By that I mean that he puts the "he said" in an awkward part of the sentence, usually in an unnatural spot too far to the beginning of the sentence. The two of these combined to really grate on me as I read the novel.

It's also fair to address James Clavell's Shogun at this point too. The two novels involve a foreigner coming to Japan and trying to understand the country, although Clavell's character has an easier time of it. Both novels have multiple plots and characters, but Clavell's easily has more. Mitchell has better characters and, when discounting the two annoyances with his narrative style I mentioned above, has a better use of language. Clavell had better atmosphere, if I remember correctly. However, I'd be hard pressed to pick which one is better. Flip a coin, I guess, and the winner is--

It's a semi-interesting story at times, but there really isn't much to discuss (other than an anti-religion tone). While the ending is well done, I don't think it saves this one.