The Garden of Evening Mists is not a “quick read”-the author’s pacing is deliberate and elegiac. In a narrative that slips in and out of the past, Tan unfolds the story of this growing bond between Yun Ling and Aritomo, revealing histories that both prefer to keep hidden.
This war between remembering and forgetting sets Yun Ling on the path to meeting Aritomo, a reclusive Japanese man who night be the only person in Malaysia who can help her. With his epigraph, a quote by Richard Holmes, author Tan Twan Eng captures the mood and themes of The Garden of Evening Mists, a quietly profound novel about a Straits Chinese woman whose desire to simultaneously honor her sister’s memory and move on from a traumatic past takes plagues her adult life. 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? But the Garden of Evening Mists remains a place of mystery. Aritomo refuses but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice "until the monsoon comes." Then she can design a garden for herself.Īs the months pass, Yung Ling finds herself intimately drawn to the gardener and his art, while all around them a communist guerrilla war rages. 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. 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. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of Cameron Highlands.
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