The Garden of Evening Mists
Description
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?
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Community Reviews
I have a feeling this one will linger in my mind for a while. Beautiful date language evokes images of the Japanese garden at the heart of the story and there is much to be learned about Malayan, Chinese and Japanese culture in this.
Yun Ling is a judge, retiring early from her career, to revisit some of the lessons learned in her youth.
She had been captured with her sister as a teenager and enslaved by the Japanese in WWII, the only person from ...read more
Yun Ling is a judge, retiring early from her career, to revisit some of the lessons learned in her youth.
She had been captured with her sister as a teenager and enslaved by the Japanese in WWII, the only person from ...read more
The descriptions of the Japanese garden of Yuguri will transport you to the Cameron Highlands of Malaya. But this book goes so much deeper than that. The characters are full of depth and each have their own individual stories which weave together in a story of love and survival during the Japanese occupation of Malaya.
4.5 stars.
A very compelling novel. Written in an atmospheric and poetic language, the book manages to intertwine multiple narrative layers that develop across the complicated 20th century history of Malaysia. Extremely interesting in its historical fiction and the personal drama of the complex characters. The beauty of some of the most important Eastern thought principles is prominent too.
It's a complicated book that starts calmly but soon gets i...read more
A very compelling novel. Written in an atmospheric and poetic language, the book manages to intertwine multiple narrative layers that develop across the complicated 20th century history of Malaysia. Extremely interesting in its historical fiction and the personal drama of the complex characters. The beauty of some of the most important Eastern thought principles is prominent too.
It's a complicated book that starts calmly but soon gets i...read more
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