She tells us of her years with the gardener, Aritomo, who becomes her lover and the only person with whom she shares the story of what happened in that concentration camp.Īt its heart, this is a story of a Chinese-Malaysian woman who comes to love a Japanese man, despite the horrors of her experiences at the hands of the Japanese a man who helps her to heal, as she helps him, even as his particular role in the occupation and subjugation of the Malaysians remains obscured by its own evening mists. The novel thus moves us, gently and with an exquisitely deft touch, backwards and forwards in time, from Yun Ling’s present situation, back to her childhood, and through her life after the war.

That story on its own would make hard reading, but the fore story is that of Yun Ling as she is now, a woman near seventy and a retired Supreme Court judge, suffering with an incurable illness that affects her memory, who has travelled back to the garden of Yugiri (Evening Mists) in the Cameroon Highlands, where she had once been apprenticed to a Japanese master gardener with the dream of eventually building her own garden as a memorial for her dead sister. As if subjugation and torture from the Japanese weren’t enough to cope with for the tormented people of Malaya, the Chinese Communists insurgency also terrorised them for twelve long years, both during and after the war. It carries us through the experiences of our narrator, Teoh Yun Ling, who was held for three years in a brutal camp, along with her sister, and who is the sole survivor of that camp. The story is hard to endure at times, due to its historical context: Malaya during the Japanese invasion, which began on 8 December 1941, just after midnight (thus preceding the attack on Pearl Harbor). I loved The Gift of Rain which I read first, but The Garden of Evening Mists has surpassed it in my admiration.

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng Book Review: The Garden of Evening Mists, by Tan Twan Eng td Whittle Posted on September 21, 2018

The garden of evening mists review