The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

In 1799 a Dutchman named Jacob de Zoet sailed to Japan as a clerk for the Dutch East Indies Company. His job was to straighten out the messy accounts left by predecessors and in the course of this work he uncovers corruption and fraud; he also makes and loses money, and he falls in love with a medical student who gets whisked off to be held prisoner in a nunnery. Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, is an excellent writer who packs lots of meaning into few words. Sometimes his style feels cryptic; other times he runs two conversations at once so you have to look at every other sentence to make sense of each. Good novel, but not easy reading.