Tan Twan Eng
An ethereal, meditative tone permeates the atmosphere of The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng. The narrative unfolds in the first person-point of view of the Supreme Court judge in Kuala Lumpur, Teoh Yun Ling. Her voice is dull, bland, as if to suggest she has had a lifetime of repressing her emotions. Diagnosed with aphasia, Yun Ling retires to the Cameron Highlands, the tropical rain forest where she grew up and where the former gardener of the Emperor of Japan, Nakamura Aritomo, resides.
The narrative unfolds very slowly. The details of Yun Ling’s past emerge in fragments scattered throughout the novel in the form of extended flashbacks. The daughter of a prominent Chinese Malaysian family, Yun Ling and her sister had been captured by the Japanese during their invasion of Malaysia and sent to a prisoner of war camp where her sister was brutally and repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers and where Yun Ling did what she had to do to survive.
The horrors of the prison camp are never far from Yun Ling’s memory, frequently impinging on her daily activities even decades later. Until her retirement, her professional life was dedicated to prosecuting Japanese war criminals and to locating the prison camp to retrieve her sister’s remains. With the onset of aphasia and the knowledge she is losing her memory and will soon lose her ability to understand language, she decides to honor a promise she made to her sister by hiring Aritomo to build a Japanese garden for her.
Aritomo declines to work for her, instead offering to take her on as his apprentice to teach her the skills in building a Japanese garden. Despite her hatred for Japanese, Yun Ling accepts. Against the violent backdrop of a Malaysia in turmoil after World War II, British occupation, and a communist insurgency, the Japanese garden forms a verdant oasis of peace and tranquility. As layer upon layer of the garden slowly takes shape, the connection between Aritomo and Yun Ling slowly deepens until they become lovers.
Tan Twan Eng weaves the concepts informing the ancient arts of Japanese gardening and tattooing with the brutality of war, the inhumane acts it generates, and the guilt associated with survival. In poetic language and immersive imagery, the novel explores the theme of remembering and forgetting—what we remember and what we try to forget. This is particularly poignant since Yun Ling suffers from aphasia and will soon forget the memories that haunt her.
Just as the Japanese garden is a deceptively simple construction, none of the characters are what they superficially appear to be. Their external veneers gradually strip away to reveal complex, conflicted personalities haunted by their past actions. And just as a Japanese garden requires empty space to fulfill its promise, the novel ends with empty space in the form of inconclusive answers to open-ended questions.
A finely crafted, mesmerizing novel, rich with ambiguity and suggestion.