Introduction: David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time

To date, David Mitchell’s fiction comprises six adventurously heterogeneous novels. Three are “cosmopolitan”¹ in scope and structure, composed of sections that skip freely around in time and space: Ghostwritten (2001), Cloud Atlas (2004), and The Bone Clocks (2014). There are two very different coming-of-age tales of teenage boys: Number9dream (2003), set in Tokyo, reads like a Haruki Murakami novel unfolding inside a video game; and the semi-autobiographical Black Swan Green (2007), narrated by a 13-year old in the English Midlands. The historical novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2011) faithfully evokes Dutch contact with Japan in Nagasaki Harbor at the turn into the 19^th century, before turning into a romance-thriller.