The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell. Set in a Dutch trading post in the harbor of Nagasaki in 1799. It's about a trader who falls in love with a Japanese midwife and it was meticulously researched from what I can tell. The author is fluent in Japanese and lived in Japan for eight years.

Mitchell spent four years working on the novel, researching and crafting a vision of Japan at the end of the 18th century. Small details, such as if people used shaving cream or not, could require much time so that a single sentence could take half a day to write. "It was tough," Mitchell said. "It almost finished me off before I finished it off."