The Garden of Evening Mists [en]

When I was looking for a book from a Malaysian author, Tan Twan Eng was in most lists I found, so the choice was not difficult to make.

I was also very interested in this book because of the Malaysian students I taught 25 years ago. There were two main groups of students: the Malay students, and the Chinese-Malaysian students, and they were never friends. When my Chinese-Malaysian students complained that they were oppressed in their own country, and the Malay students complained that the Chinese-Malaysians were always complaining about everything, I never understood why these problems existed. Thanks to this book, I now understand better the tensions that exist between these two different ethnic groups.

This is the story of Yun Ling Teoh, a Chinese-Malaysian woman. After having been interned in a Japanese wartime camp for three years, she asks a Japanese man, Nakamura Aritomo, a former gardener to the Emperor of Japan who is now living in Malaysia, in the tea plantations of Cameron Highlands, to create a Japanese garden in memory of her sister, who was killed in the Japanese camp and loved Japanese gardens. Aritomo refuses, but he agrees to take Yun Ling as his apprentice so that she can design the garden herself later. Both Aritomo and Yun Ling have painful secrets, and little by little, we learn about the past of these intriguing characters and their friends: Magnus, an expatriate from Transvaal, Frederik, Magnus’s nephew, Emily, Magnus’s Chinese-Malaysian wife, and finally Yoshikawa Tatsuji, a Japanese historian who is fascinated by Aritomo’s gardens.

The novel goes back and forth between 1) this postwar story of Yun Ling and Aritomo, working together in his own garden called Yugiri, in Cameron Highlands, in the early 1950s; 2) Yun Ling’s return to Cameron Highlands in the late 1980s, after working as a judge in Kuala Lumpur and overseeing a number of war crimes cases against the Japanese occupiers; and 3) World War II, which provides the backdrop for the story. It’s not always easy to understand when something is happening, but once you know that Aritomo is dead when Yun Ling goes back to Cameron Highlands, it’s much easier to follow the story. 

I thought it was an incredible story. The historical background is fascinating because most people know of Emperor Hirohito (mostly through history textbooks and the movie The Last Emperor) and the atrocities committed by the Japanese in China before and during WWII, but Malaysia’s wartime history is less well known. I loved the story of Tatsuji, the Japanese historian, and his war experience as a Kamikaze. I also loved the suspens that runs throughout the story about Aritomo’s life and disappearance, the secret Japanese camp, Yun Ling’s sister’s death, the Japanese treasure, and Yun Ling’s survival.

I loved the slow and serene pace of the story—very Japanese. And even though the novel was filled with tragic events, it was also a beautiful reflection on the fact that everyone has secrets and no one is ever completely good or bad. It is also a story about the power and malleability of memory.