The Garden of Evening Mists in Around the World

Aug 10, 2012 Friederike Knabe rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: asia

Yugiri, meaning "Evening Mist" and a famous (in the novel) Japanese Garden, is much more than a backdrop or setting for this totally mesmerizing and haunting novel. With its creator and his former apprentice, it is at the core of events and place. Like all Japanese Gardens Yugiri offers calm and serenity for reflection and beauty for the eye by capturing nature through "shakkei", borrowed scenery, within a given space. Nakamura Aritomo, the Emperor's gardener after leaving his Japanese homeland Yugiri, meaning "Evening Mist" and a famous (in the novel) Japanese Garden, is much more than a backdrop or setting for this totally mesmerizing and haunting novel. With its creator and his former apprentice, it is at the core of events and place. Like all Japanese Gardens Yugiri offers calm and serenity for reflection and beauty for the eye by capturing nature through "shakkei", borrowed scenery, within a given space. Nakamura Aritomo, the Emperor's gardener after leaving his Japanese homeland in 1940, has been creating a formal Japanese garden "that is only his" in the central highlands of the Malayan Peninsula. It is a region well known for its extensive tea plantations, seen on the cover of the book, that reach into to mountainous rainforest beyond. The extraordinarily beautiful landscape has something mysterious, spiritual and otherworldly about it. Aritomo, placing himself clearly into the ancient tradition of formal Japanese garden design principles, appears to live himself in a different world, working, meditating, walking, secluded in his garden...

Retired Supreme Court Judge in Kuala Lumpur, Yun Ling Teoh, of Chinese-Malay background, returns to Yugiri, the garden "above the clouds", thirty four years after she had seen it for the last time. The "stillness of the mountain awakens" her again; the "depth of the silence" that Yugiri represents wraps around her like a protective delicate silk shawl. Why does she return? Tan Twan Eng gives Yun Ling the voice to tell the story of her life, often in flashbacks, from the time she arrived for the first time at Cameron Highlands, the nearby tea plantation, owned by family friends, and where she hoped to meet Aritomo, until now that she feels age and illness making her return visit an urgent need. It a quest to rekindle and revive memories of the past, and, hopefully, to find answers to questions that have been with her for decades.

Above all, Yun Ling carries the loving memory of her sister, an avid student of Japanese Gardens, who did not survive the terrible conditions in a labour camp where both had been imprisoned during the Japanese occupation of Malaya (1942-45). Yun Ling had promised to build a garden for her sister if she escapes. After the war she, the sole survivor, tried to locate the notorious camp, but nobody seemed to know anything about it. Her ordeal and search for the truth also motivated her to become a prosecutor of Japanese war criminals. Emotions were buried deep inside her. "Emptiness: it appealed to me, the possibility of ridding myself of everything I had seen and heard and lived through". Meeting Aritomo, hostility and suspicion between the war victim and the Japanese gardener are difficult barriers to overcome. Yet, the mostly silent Mr. Nakamura is the best gardener there is for Yun Ling's project. Not surprisingly, he refuses to comply with her request to design her sister's garden. Instead, he offers her to become his apprentice for some months to learn all about designing it herself.

Tan Twan Eng's exquisitely conceived and written novel is captivating on different levels. On the one hand, he entrances your imagination with his detailed descriptions of Yugiri, its luscious colours, its ambiance and architectural features. We learn much about Japanese traditional gardens and its varied purposes. The author's gentle and delicate exploration of the slowly intensifying relationship between Aritomo and Yun Ling also enables Yun Ling's eventually telling her story about life under Japanese occupation. Her account of post-war civil strife before independence of Malaysia in 1963 and those involving others living near or passing through Yugiri are important and valuable additions. Nothing is clear-cut, ambiguities surround all central characters; some have even crossed paths before... and might again. How many questions will be answered or mysteries solved is less the concern than what is learned in human terms, in terms of memory, forgetting and, above all, understanding and forgiving.
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Oct 05, 2012 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: location-malaysia, read2012, around-the-world, booker-winners-and-listed

This is a truly incredible book, and is my pick to win the Man Booker Prize this year, and I say that even before reading the last of the six.

Publisher summary: 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, This is a truly incredible book, and is my pick to win the Man Booker Prize this year, and I say that even before reading the last of the six.

Publisher summary: 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. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in Kuala Lumpur, in memory of her sister who died in the camp.

The story is told in a dual way with some side trips. Part of the story comes from the time shortly after Yun Ling is no longer a POW, and part of the story comes from the time after she has retired from being a judge and comes back to the garden. She has aphasia and is trying to capture as much of her life as she can before she loses her memory. The author does something really interesting with the storytelling in that she will have a conversation in her present-day life in one chapter where a phrase or person will be mentioned, but as the reader you don't discover the details about the person or phrase until she goes back to tell the story. It isn't done in an obvious way, but in the natural way that stories unfold, where a passing mention of something can recall a memory you didn't even know you have access to anymore.

I learned a lot about Malaya/Malaysia from British and Dutch occupation to World War II to the "Malayan Emergency." The philosophy behind Japanese gardening and the Tao Te Ching both weave their way throughout the novel, and the author seems to embrace the aesthetics of both in his writing as well. While Yun Ling is being taught to slow down, breathe, focus; I felt I was being asked to do that as a reader.

I can't pick out specific examples because this is a novel that should be experienced as a whole. ...more

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Nov 11, 2012 Shomeret rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: my-reviews, historical-fiction

Judging from the description, I thought that this book might be very similar to Tan Twan Eng's first novel, The Gift of Rain, but they are very different books.
Because The Gift of Rainis situated during WWII, it has a direct impact that yields tremendous intensity.

The Garden of Evening Mistsis more distanced. It deals with the fragility of memory. Jurist Yun Ling Teoh is losing her memories and hopes to preserve them through a written record. This is the purpose of history, and indeed of all ...more

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Nov 20, 2015 Dioni rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: recent-favorites

Rating: 4.5/5

First published at: http://www.meexia.com/bookie/2015/12/...

The Garden of Evening Mists is the second book by Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng. It's the winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize 2012, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012, and the winner for Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction 2013. Tan's first book The Gift of Rain was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007. What amazing accolades to start a literary career!

The book is set in the exotic post-war pre-independe ...more

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Jul 31, 2014 Nick rated it it was amazing

The garden of the title is aptly named because the novel is set in a world where nothing is what it appears to be. What is most important stays out of view or is hidden in the dense foreground; the novel’s characters frequently reveal less than they conceal. That is wise of them, because this past, as viewed through the prism of retired Judge Teoh Yun Ling’s fading memory, is a lethal place. Where Judge Teoh chooses to spend her remaining lucidity is that garden, where she sought in the years af The garden of the title is aptly named because the novel is set in a world where nothing is what it appears to be. What is most important stays out of view or is hidden in the dense foreground; the novel’s characters frequently reveal less than they conceal. That is wise of them, because this past, as viewed through the prism of retired Judge Teoh Yun Ling’s fading memory, is a lethal place. Where Judge Teoh chooses to spend her remaining lucidity is that garden, where she sought in the years after World War II to honor a sister who died in the Japanese labor camp she escaped—not incidentally by becoming a translator for the Japanese, a cushioned post among the brutalized and debilitated prisoners. Even post-war Malaya, when much of the action takes place, remained dangerous–after years of war, as the country that would become Malaysia negotiated for independence from the British Empire, it also was fighting off a Marxist insurgency. The jungle that hemmed the garden and the neighboring tea plantation hid secrets—the rebels, the corpses of those who got lost or were abducted, perhaps the gold that the Japanese confiscated, the location of the labor camp itself and the bodies of the prisoners, all under the watchful eyes of the orang asli, the original forest people. And yet it was the kind of place where the tea planter, who had fought the British in the Boer Wars, could entertain the former gardener of the Japanese Emperor, the younger Judge Teoh, who is Straights Chinese, and even British colonial officials. (Even if assassination and curfew limited how long the parties lasted). The older Judge Teoh narrates from a different kind of frontier—she is struggling to capture her memories on paper before they disappear into the jungle of age. This is in the end a novel about the boundaries that humans try to impose on the landscape and on experience itself and how variable and impermanent those borders are—between peace and violence, truth and telling, love and betrayal, memory and forgetting (both the eroding kind and the deliberately erased). The author of this novel has a rare gift for asking a multitude of questions and letting them resonate before leaving them unanswered. That works because the story is rich with detail, the narrative voice credible, impassioned and raw. The complexity of the writing should now be evident; as for its quality, I find it astonishing that any writer could write a moving sub-plot about a kamikaze pilot while in no way minimizing the arrogant and utter brutality of the Japanese empire and military. Yet in this novel, that is precisely one, but only one, of Tan Twan Eng’s achievements. ...more

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Jun 06, 2016 Kristi rated it liked it

Shelves: reading-challenge-2016

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I read this book as part of the Book Riot Read Harder challenge and waited about three months to write a review, so my memory is a little hazy. This novel opens as Yun Ling, an aging Chinese woman and noted judge is about to retire due to health problems. As she begins to lose her memory, she is drawn back to the plantations of Northern Malaya where she was once apprenticed to the former gardener of the emperor of Japan; she traveled there in hopes of commissioning a garden in honor of her siste I read this book as part of the Book Riot Read Harder challenge and waited about three months to write a review, so my memory is a little hazy. This novel opens as Yun Ling, an aging Chinese woman and noted judge is about to retire due to health problems. As she begins to lose her memory, she is drawn back to the plantations of Northern Malaya where she was once apprenticed to the former gardener of the emperor of Japan; she traveled there in hopes of commissioning a garden in honor of her sister, who had perished in the brutal Japanese war camp from which Yun Ling herself had only barely managed to escape. As the now elderly Yun Ling attempts to deal with the future of Yugiri, the Japanese garden that she once so lovingly tended, she reminisces about the events that brought her there and the man that she grew to love. The novel revolves around two mysteries: the mystery of Aritomo, the exiled royal gardener who simply disappeared on day, and the mystery of how exactly Yun Ling managed to survive a camp which had never been found and from which no one else had ever emerged.

This novel manages to weave together a shocking number of elements of Japanese culture and history: gardens, comfort women, tattoos, kamikaze, wartime atrocities, Yamashita's gold... it's really pretty impressive. While some may feel that the author engaged in the fetishization of Japanese culture at times, it is also true that these elements were woven together in such a way and in such a setting that they seemed to take on a new character. Particularly because the novel was set in Malaya in two very different time periods, the imposition of Japanese culture served to highlight the specifics of that country in the midst of key transitions. The author managed to maintain the tension between admiring a culture and hating its people in that way.

The protagonist is a very strong woman, flawed yet powerful. Tan Twan Eng managed to write her voice in a very real and compelling way. His portrayal of her trauma from her experiences during the war was believable. It was also interesting to see the ways that her class, race, and sex as a rich Chinese woman interacted with her experiences during the war. Personally, I liked the novel rather less once the romantic storylines set in, but that might just be because I found them to be rather unnecessary; they seemed to detract from a novel that didn't really need more and would have been perhaps better served by leaving things to the imagination of the reader. But the story of Yun Lin's tattoo was beautifully told.

I would recommend this book to readers who are very interested in World War II, Japanese history/culture, and Southeast Asia. It is a bit of a slog at times, and the representations of Japan do border on the fetishistic, but it is an interesting tale. It's probably a bit too long and heavy for the average casual reader. ...more

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Jan 09, 2013 Rosana rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2013, bookish-s13-challenge

It has been a long time since I can devote a whole day to a book, or… it has been a long time since a book engages me to a degree that I absolutely had to devote my whole day to it. It also has been a couple months since I “read” a book, as I have “listened” to books more often than not.

The main narrative in this book is the atrocities committed by the Japanese on the occupied Asian territories during WWII – a subject that seems to be getting more headlines in the past few years – but it certai ...more

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