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Summary
Summary
This "elegant and haunting novel of war, art and memory" ( The Independent ) award-winning novel from the acclaimed author of The Gift of Rain follows the only Malaysian survivor of a Japanese wartime camp as she begins working for an exiled former gardener of the Emporer.
Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of Cameron Highlands. 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. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her sister, who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice "until the monsoon comes." Then she can design a garden for herself. As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn to the gardener and his art, while all around them a communist guerilla war rages. But the Garden of Evening Mists remains a place of mystery. Who is Aritomo and how did he come to leave Japan? And is the real story of how Yun Ling managed to survive the war perhaps the darkest secret of all?
Author Notes
Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang, Malaysia, but lived in various places in Malaysia as a child. He worked as an Intellectual Property lawyer before resigning from his position to write his novel, The Gift of Rain . His second novel, The Garden of Evening Mists , will be published in the United Kingdom in February 2012. The Gift of Rain was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Greek, Romanian, Czech and Serbian. Tan Twan Eng lives in Cape Town.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
After having endured the miseries of a Japanese internment camp during WWII, 28-year-old Yun Ling Teoh makes her way in 1951 to the only Japanese garden in her native Malaya in a bid to convince its caretaker, Nakamura Aritomo, the former gardener for the Emperor of Japan, to establish a commemorative plot for her sister who died in the camp. Though he initially refuses, Aritomo agrees to mentor Yun Ling so that she might design the garden herself. While toiling away in Yugiri, the titular "garden of evening mists," Yun Ling grows fond of Aritomo, meanwhile recalling the horrors of the camp and the difficulties of the post-WWII "Emergency" in Malaya, a prolonged period of guerrilla war whose reach creeps closer by the day. Alternating between her time with Aritomo and a future wherein the now-aged Yun Ling, fighting a degenerative brain disease, desperately seeks to preserve her memories of the garden, Eng's newest (after The Gift of Rain) has the makings of a moving and unique historical, but the novel falls flat. There is a puzzling lack of pathos, and Eng's similar treatment of the tragic and the mundane serves to downplay rather than highlight the differences between the two. As a result, there is very little-other than Eng's moving atmospherics and attention to detail-to draw readers along. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
As intricately designed as a Japanese garden, this deceptively quiet novel resonates with the power to inspire a variety of passionate emotions. Reflecting back on her life as a neurological disease threatens to erase her memories, retired Chinese-Malaysian judge Teoh Yun Ling reveals, layer by layer, the horrors she and her sister experienced during the war when they were interred in a Japanese slave-labor camp. As the sisters attempt to mentally escape by immersing themselves in intricate recollections of the Japanese gardens they once visited, the brutality of their reality increases daily. After the war, Yun Ling appeals to Nakamura Aritomo, the exiled former gardener to the emperor of Japan to design a garden in her sister's memory. Instead, she becomes Aritomo's apprentice and eventually his lover. It is many years before all of her own secrets and those of Aritomo are revealed, for nothing is as simple as it initially appears in the Garden of Evening Mists. A haunting novel certain to stay with the reader long after the book is closed.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IF you've never seen one, it's almost impossible to capture the mesmerizing allure of a classic Japanese garden - and even standing for the first time in front of a bed of raked gravel can be a challenge. No vivid colors. No sweeping borders. No topiary animals. No shooting fountains. No fun, it would seem. Still, the traditional Japanese garden, esoteric as it is, has an ancient and undeniable appeal. It's about secrets, perspectives, initiation, memory and time. It may take ages for a Japanese garden to come to maturity, to say nothing of the gardener. And yet, for all its mystery, the Japanese garden reveals itself as a capacious symbol of the human soul, replete with exactly the kinds of "borrowed landscapes" we live with. But we call them our personal histories. The crucial action in "The Garden of Evening Mists," a strong, quiet novel by Tan Twan Eng, a Malaysian writer who now lives part of the year in Cape Town, takes place in Malaya just after World War II. The beautiful garden referred to in the title plays host to the intertwining of several lives at a period cursed with being, so the saying goes, an "interesting time." As the story begins, decades later, Judge Yun Ling Teoh, the second woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court that sits in Kuala Lumpur, is retiring from the bench. In late middle age, she has been given a terrible diagnosis: she will soon lose her memory, indeed all cognitive function. She has unfinished business with the past, so the approaching obliteration of her mind sends her back, urgently, to a time she has done her best to repress. With her beloved older sister, an artist, she had been held prisoner in a Japanese internment camp when she was 19 years old. She survived. Her sister did not Yun Ling's last work - her last act of judgment, perhaps - will address her own actions during that time. Why did she survive and her sister perish? In her final days, Yun Ling drives to Yugiri, in the Cameron Highlands, about four hours from Kuala Lumpur. There she returns to the Japanese garden that has haunted her since the last time she visited, 35 years earlier. It is "a place that existed only in the overlapping of air and water, light and time," where she is struck by "the scent of pine, resin sticking to the air, the bamboo creaking and knocking in the breeze, the broken mosaic of sunlight scattered over the ground." The garden called Evening Mists is where she learned about the art of borrowed scenery, "taking elements and views from outside a garden and making them integral" to the garden itself. Evening Mists was the masterpiece of a man who had once been employed by the emperor of Japan - and, in an unlikely twist of fate, it is this gardener, Aritomo, who helps heal, the trauma of her imprisonment. He too is long gone. Yun Ling's last job will be to restore his garden to its former glory. When they first meet, Yun Ling is prematurely aged and embittered - and physically maimed - by the deprivations of the camp where she was, as it was euphemistically called, "a guest of the emperor." Aritomo admonishes her to take off her shoes: "You bring the problems of the world inside." As indeed she does - the problems of a broken heart, of fury and a desire for revenge, of utter confusion and a debilitating sense of betrayal. ARITOMO, a fascinating character, the embodiment of this novel's eloquent mystery, is not only a master gardener but an artist, a master of ukiyo-e, woodblock prints of "the floating world," themselves expressions of fleeting beauty and impermanence. Aritomo is also a tattoo artist, and the novel culminates in a spellbinding ritual of inking, as Aritomo creates a horimono covering Yun Ling's back. The tattoo captures all the things that should be remembered when designing a garden, "every aspect" of which, he teaches her, "is a form of deception." And yet, somehow, the gardeners' tricks hint at deeper truths - perspectives that, though they might be borrowed, are also grounding and ennobling. 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Guardian Review
It is impossible to resist the opening sentence of this sumptuously produced, Booker-longlisted novel: "On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan." As with Tan Twan Eng's first novel, The Gift of Rain, in a setting of quasi-mythical lushness a refined, patrician character must come to terms with a painful history. Amid "the stillness of the mountains" and "the depth of the silence", a story slowly unfolds. Very, very slowly. The narrator is the austere Supreme Court judge Teoh Yun Ling, who has retired from public service in Kuala Lumpur to return to the Cameron Highlands, where she has unfinished business: her past and that of her country. As Yun-Ling reconnects with old friends at the hill station and the tone becomes contemplative, we slip into chronologically complex flashbacks. Slowly, the narrative turns to the main dramatic event: the fascinating relationship between Yun Ling and gardener Nakamura Aritomo. Self-exiled from imperial Japan after a dispute with his employer Emperor Hirohito, Aritomo settles in the hilltops of Malaya and begins to build Yugiri, a "garden of evening mists". Into his life comes independent Yun Ling, daughter of a prosperous Chinese Malaysian family, and the sole survivor of a prisoner-of-war camp. It is 1951, and she is a prosecutor of war criminals and a hater of all things Japanese except one. Her request to Aritomo is simple: build a garden for her sister who perished in the camp, and who loved the gardens of Kyoto. The taciturn Aritomo is not in the habit of pleasing anyone or apologising for his country's crimes. Instead he offers to teach Yun Ling the art of Japanese gardening, for two years. Almost against herself, she becomes his apprentice, then his lover, and finally, the canvas for his masterpiece: horimono, a full-body Japanese tattoo. The chapters in which this redemptive relationship unfolds through the rich metaphors of gardening, tattooing, tea-ceremonies, and Zen philosophy are the psychological core of the novel. Meanwhile, we learn about existential gardening concepts such asshakkei, "borrowed scenery"; that "every aspect of gardening is a form of deception"; that the "Art of Setting Stones" is back-breaking; that a garden is the expression of spiritual states. We learn about archery, which Aritomo practices as a form of meditation. We learn about tea-growing, and about the sexually charged practice of horimono (did you know that the subject becomes addicted to the pain?), and chilling details about Japanese war-camps where those such as Yun Ling were "guests of the Emperor", as the obscene term went. This is a novel that overflows with historical and specialist information, and like The Gift of Rain, it showcases Tan Twan Eng as a master of cultural complexities. The secondary character, Magnus, is a South African whose heart is in Malaya, and who like Yun Ling becomes entangled in the pre-independence turmoil of the 1950s. Indeed, all the characters, including the righteous Yun Ling and the wise Aritomo, are slowly revealed to be morally ambiguous, compromised by actions that haunt them. The theme here is remembering and forgetting, illustrated by a suitable double metaphor: there is a Mnemosyne garden statue, and Yun Ling suffers from aphasia. This novel ticks many boxes: its themes are serious, its historic grounding solid, its structure careful, its old-fashioned ornamentalism respectable. The reason I found it impossible to love is the quality of the writing. There is no discernible personality in the dutiful, dull voice of Yun Ling, and non-events stalk us on every page: "for a timeless moment I looked straight into his eyes"; "For a long while he does not say anything. Finally he begins to speak in a slow, steady voice." The self-conscious dialogue resembles a history lesson collated for the benefit of the western reader, and everything is ponderously "like" something else, so it takes twice as long: "We were like two moths around a candle, circling closer and closer to the flames, waiting to see whose wings would catch fire first." Despite the dramatic events, the overall effect is one of surprising blandness, like something you've read before. Kapka Kassabova's Twelve Minutes of Love is published by Portobello.
Library Journal Review
Like his debut, The Gift of Rain (2007), Malaysian author Tan's second novel is exquisite and, like Gift, arrives stateside with Booker Prize long-list approval. Recently retired judge Teoh Yun Ling has at most a year before she will lose all language and memory to aphasia. She leaves Kuala Lumpur for the highlands of central Malaysia and finds Yugiri-the book's eponymous Garden of Evening Mists-where she's agreed to meet a Japanese scholar writing a book about Yugiri's creator, Aritomo, the self-exiled former gardener to the emperor of Japan. Four decades earlier, in spite of being the single survivor of a horrific World War II Japanese prison, Yun Ling apprenticed herself to Aritomo, hoping to someday create the perfect garden to honor her murdered sister. Almost 38 years have passed since Aritomo disappeared, and now, threatened with erasure, Yun Ling begins to record his story as well as her own. VERDICT Tan triumphs again, entwining the redemptive power of storytelling with the search for elusive truth, all the while juxtaposing Japan's ignominious war history with glorious moments of Japanese art and philosophy. Readers in search of spectacular writing will not be disappointed.-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.