The Garden of Evening Mists

Review by: Elise Hadden, Under the Heather Books [...]SummaryAs you settle into the first page of The Garden of Evening Mists, Tan Twan Eng and his majestic prose will gently transport you into a painfully beautiful past. It’s Malaya, 1949. After studying law at Cambridge and time spent helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, Yun Ling Teoh, herself the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed plantations of Northern Malaya where she grew up as a child. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the Emperor of Japan.As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn to Aritomo and his art while, outside the garden, the threat of murder and kidnapping from the guerrillas of the jungle hinterland increases with each passing day. But the Garden of Evening Mists is also a place of mystery. Who is Aritomo and how did he come to leave Japan? Why is it that Yun Ling’s friend and host, Magnus Praetorius, seems almost immune from the depredations of the Communists? And is the real story of how Yun Ling managed to survive the war perhaps the darkest secret of all?—Goodreads description, edited and abbreviatedP.S. Don’t forget to check out more beautiful quotes from this book in this Thursday Quotables!“Below these words was the garden’s name in English: EVENING MISTS. I felt I was about to enter a place that existed only in the overlapping of air and water, light and time.”What I LikedThe prose in this novel is perhaps the most beautiful I have ever encountered. Tan Twan Eng gives us writing that is poetic, lyrical, and laced with a rare subtle strength. The depictions of the scenery are brilliantly evocative, and I felt an intimate understanding of the landscape. His characterization was spectacular, mysterious and commanding.Now, to dive beyond the style of writing and into the subject matter. All I can say is a gigantic, resounding, earthshattering WOW. This book tackled a dizzying array of emotional and political aspects of the Pacific War. As Yun Ling struggles with forgiveness, grief, and memory, the complexities of this devastating war are carefully resurrected. Aritomo, the master gardener, is ripe with beautiful bits of wisdom and yet remains an enigma. Tan Twan Eng weaves through an exploration of the power of memory and forgetting, as well as the elaborate world of Japanese art and horimono, with such penetrating insight that the reader cannot help but be irrevocably changed.“That point in time just as the last leaf is about to drop, as the remaining petal is about to fall; that moment captures everything beautiful and sorrowful about life. Mono no aware, the Japanese call it.”What I Didn’t LikeI have a headache from the strain of trying to find something to criticize in this book. I listened to it as an audiobook, narrated by Anna Bentinck. Although I ended up enjoying her narration very much, I do wish I had a hard copy. Her attempts at mimicking male Japanese voices and female Chinese ones were…painful. So, my only complaint is that the narrator doesn’t have the voice range of Mel Blanc. I’d say that’s a good sign.“Before me lies a voyage of a million miles, and my memory is the moonlight I will borrow to illuminate my way.”My RecommendationThis book is not for the faint of heart. It tackles terrifying and sometimes gruesome scenes. However, Tan Twan Eng frosts even the most offensive of the events in a veil of pensive reflection. He transforms this vicarious trauma into something hurts in all the right places, illuminating the unfathomable and confronting the unjust. While reading, I felt I was in a floating world, caressed by dew and mountain breezes even as I gazed with perfect clarity on the tortured world below. It’s a breathtaking and powerful depiction of the depths of love, pain, and the capacity to forgive.However, if you like fast-paced novels with a lot of action, this certainly is not the book for you. Although many exciting things happen, the pace is slow, like swimming through water thick with reeds. It’s heavy on the physical descriptions, heavy on internal narration and emotions, and very light on urgency. I was l to the story while on a roadtrip and my poor fiance was bored out of his mind.“The palest ink will endure beyond the memories of man.”

This is a tale of war and loss. The central character is a Chinese Malaysian daughter of a wealthy rubber trader. She and her sister are taken as teenagers in the 1940s to a Japanese labor camp, where she is initially forced into a brutal mining operation and her sister becomes a “comfort woman” for Japanese guards. Eventually, her knowledge of English allows her to become a translator for one of the Japanese officials of the camp and she is allowed to escape the destruction of the camp and murder of all its remaining prisoners at the end of the war, the sole survivor. The second part of her story is her plan to build a Japanese garden in honor of her sister. To that end, she moves to a tea plantation to become an apprentice and eventual lover of a man who is a prominent artist and was once a gardener to the Japanese emperor. This is the period of the communist insurgency in Malaya, another time of great strife and brutality. After the disappearance of her Japanese lover she goes to England to get a law degree and follow a career as an important judge in independent Malaysia. As she reaches her 60s, she is diagnosed with a neurological condition that will rob her of memory and functions. So she returns to the tea plantation to write about her experiences and honor her Japanese mentor by rebuilding his garden and studying his other artistic efforts.The above is a linear narrative of her story, but the novel does not unfold as a linear narrative. Instead, it progresses as a memory narrative, in fits and starts, jumping from one period to another. This approach provides a source of power to the story, but makes it a more difficult read, as the transitions are often abrupt and unanticipated. It is not a story for a casual read.This is the second novel by this author that I have read, both about the Japanese occupation of Malaya and its consequences. This book is more lyrical and mysterious and well worth reading for both its historical value and its unfolding of the various Asian mentalities, always a source of mystery to Americans.There have been a lot of novels recently concerned with WWII occupations, describing their brutality and psychology. A central issue has been how the Germans and Japanese, people associated with cultures of beauty and order, could have been involved in such cruelty. Aside from the “master race” argument, there have been few concrete answers, but the question is well worth continuing consideration to avoid its repetition.