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    The Garden of Evening Mists
    The Garden of Evening Mists
    The Garden of Evening Mists
    Audiobook15 hours

    The Garden of Evening Mists

    Written by Tan Twan Eng

    Narrated by Anna Bentinck

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    "One of the best novelists writing today" (Philadelphia Inquirer), Tan Twan Eng presents The Garden of Evening Mists, shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize. In 1951, Yun Ling, the only survivor of a Japanese war camp, seeks shelter with Aritomo, the owner of the only Japanese garden in Malaya. As the months pass, Aritomo and Yun Ling open to each other, revealing life-altering secrets.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateOct 26, 2012
    ISBN9781470337834
    The Garden of Evening Mists
    Author

    Tan Twan Eng

    Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang, but lived in various places in Malaysia as a child. He studied law through the University of London, and later worked as an advocate and solicitor in Kuala Lumpur. He has a first-dan ranking in Aikido and is a strong proponent for the conservation of heritage buildings. He has spent the last year traveling around South Africa, and currently lives in Cape Town where he is working on his second book.

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    Reviews for The Garden of Evening Mists

    4.5/5

    32 ratings15 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Teoh Yun Ling takes early retirement from her position as a Supreme Court Judge in the Malaysia of the 1980's to return to the garden of Yugiri in the Cameron Highlands: a place which had a pivotal role in her life but one that she had not visited for the last thirty-six years. A demanding and often abrasive woman, used to keeping lawyers in order from her position on the bench, Yun Ling is not easy to warm to: her one close friend is Frederik Pretorius, the South-African owner of the neighbouring Majuba Tea Estate. And it is to him that she discloses the true reason for her early retirement: she has been diagnosed with an incurable degenerative disease which means that soon she will start to lose her memories and the very faculty for language itself. Faced with the prospect of forgetting everything that makes her what she is, events that she has tried for most of the life to suppress come to the surface, in particular her time in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War, a camp in which her older sister died, and from which Yun Ling was the only survivor.The book focuses on Yun Long's first visit to the Cameron Highlands in 1951, when she first visited the garden of Yugiri. Created by Nakamura Arimoto, a Japanese man who was once a gardener to the Emperor, it is a traditional Japanese garden created in the Highlands of Malaya. Yun Ling travels to the Highlands to ask Aritomo to design a garden in memory of her dead sister, who had been a lover of Japanese gardens, but her hatred of the Japanese make their first dealings very difficult. Initially turning down her request, Aritomo then proposes that Yun Ling become his apprentice until the monsoon starts so that she will be able to develop her garden herself. And this is what she does, living alone despite the threat of the communist insurgency which is raging in the Malayan countryside. And as the older Yun Ling looks back upon her time in the garden so many years ago, she starts to remember and to consider the true meaning of the events in her life, both from the time spent in the garden, and from her time as a prisoner of the Japanese.This is a beautiful book, which has a very appropriate epigraph:There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until deathand it is the human desire to both remember and to forget that is at the heart of this book.I found great interest in the setting as well as the story, as it dealt with a location and period that I knew little about: Malaya (as it then was) during and after the Second World War. While I suppose I was reasonably familiar with the fall of Singapore to the Japanese and its aftermath for the British prisoners of war, including women and children, I'd never really considered the situation for non-British inhabitants of the area. And I certainly knew nothing of the communist insurgency after the war. (Mr SandDune of course did, and proceeded to give me a brief description of it, and its knock-on effect on the Vietnamese War)So my first five star read of the year: one which I think I could read again and again and continue to see connections which I had missed at first. I'd strongly recommend this to anyone who hasn't already read it.
    • 5/5
      An elegantly understated and beautifully written book about the wounds (physical and psychic) of war. Like the garden at the center of its story, the novel takes time to mature and to reveal its design, but the patient reader will be well rewarded.
    • 5/5
      This book was a marvel. The mists were certainly multi-layered and they would obscure and then reveal bits and pieces of information at different times. It was a story that was hard to read, from a time hard to understand about actions hard to fathom. And yet I was left somehow uplifted at the end. In spite of the horrors of war, slavery and life changing medical diagnoses.I have not read much WWII history and certainly not any from this viewpoint; Yun Ling Teoh is a woman of Chinese descent but British upbringing living in Malaya at the outbreak of the war. Japan has invaded Malaya and has rounded up the influential members of the community and shipped them off to slave camps. Yun Ling Teoh and her sister are taken deep into the rain forest. Yun Ling Teoh is the only one from her camp to survive. She harbors a deep hatred for the Japanese as a result.This does not stop her from forming a relationship with the Emperor's former gardener, Aritomo. She desires to build a garden in memory of her sister who loved Japanese gardens. Aritomo lives next door to a family friend. She becomes quite close to him and ends up inheriting his estate but learns she did not know him as well as she thought she did.I can't begin to sum up this many layered, well written novel in a simple review. I don't think I can even begin to truly appreciate it with only one reading. Tan Twan Eng packs so many little details into his story that don't seem important but you realize many chapters later that they were. The book moves back and forth in time as Yun Ling Teoh relates her past in the guise of writing her memoirs but the movement through time is seamless and the reader never feels confused in time.I cannot recommend this book enough. I am going to put The Gift of Rain on my list as I now want to visit Tan Twan Eng's first book. I am sure it will be as good as The Garden as Evening Mists - a garden I didn't want to leave.
    • 4/5
      I learned a lot about Japanese gardens and Asian culture as I listened to the audio version of this book. The content was quite interesting and prompted me to research more about the area before and after World War 2, the Emporer's gardens and tattoos. While the narrative skips around a bit between time frames and is confusing at parts, I did appreciate the tension the author creates as he answers questions and pulls the story together. I did not appreciate the cursing or the sexual content, including violence, but I did enjoy the book overall and recommend it to readers interested in gardening, Asia, WW2 or art, including the history of tattoos.
    • 5/5
      I loved this beautful written novel. The novel explores a number of themes, age, war, evil, art, cultural family love death and forgiving. the main character has recently learned that she has a cogitive disase that at some point cause her to have no memory. she will no longer have any cogitive skills. she seeks out a master gardener to ask him to build a garden for the memory of her sister. both the main character and her sister were in japanese prision camp during the war. the sister died. this a wonderful powerful novel
    • 4/5
      Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.There are moments when, remembering what happened, I am unable to continue writing. What troubles me more than anything, however, and the instances when I cannot recall with certainty what has taken place. I have spent most of the my life trying to forget, and now all I want is to remember. I cannot remember what my sister looked like; I do not even have a picture of her. And my conversation with Aritomo by Usugumo Pond, on that night of the meteor shower..did it take place on the day of Templer's visit or did it occur on a different evening entirely: Time is eating away my memory. Time, and this illness, this trespasser in my brain.Yun Ling Teoh is a successful judge, retiring because of a well-kept secret: a medical problem is causing deteriorating memory loss. In an attempt to help herself remember her life while she still can, Yun Ling decides to begin a journal recording her life. She begins by returning to the Garden of Evening Mists, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and the home of her now deceased mentor, Aritomo. Theirs was a complex relationship and the plot of the novel unfolds these complexities and secrets in a steady, yet convoluted way. Much like a path in the famous garden with quiet surprises in unexpected places.There is so much to discuss in this book, and I could have gone in many directions. Discussing the fascinating history of Malaysia and the Japanese invasion during WWII, leading to decades of lingering hatred and distrust. The wonderful art so lovingly depicted in the book: the art and soul of Japanese gardens, the taboos around body tattooing and the secret methods of the masters, the art of wood prints. The author's writing itself is one of the arts that make this novel so beautiful. Or I could have discussed race and class relations, the guerilla war, or the survivor story and its role in the novel. But then I came across the passage I quote at the top of the review, and I knew that this was really the heart of the story, at least for me: the elusive quality of memory, the tension between the desire to forget (so rarely bestowed when wanted) and the unremitting loss of memory due to illness or age. Since we as readers know from the beginning that Yun Ling's memories are being eaten away by disease, we must accept that she is an unreliable narrator. Is she really the only survivor of a Japanese work camp? Was her relationship with Aritomo as she writes? She never learns all of his secrets, do we ever learn all of hers? But even if all of the memories she relates are true (and I hope they are, because this fictional space the author creates is so compelling), how does time effect the way in which those stories are remembered? Malayan Chinese of her generation have layers of memories of the Japanese and their emotional responses to them. A survivor must learn to live with her memories and in doing so, remember her experiences in a way that validates her survival. We all remember history passing by in our own ways; and even our own lives, something we should know the truth of in exacting detail, is subject to haze and gaps and smoothed over areas. Our experience of memory is something that makes us humans unique. It is a gift and a curse. And then our memory is gone and a slice of truth is gone with it.
    • 5/5
      This story begins on the last day of Teoh Yun Ling's career as a Supreme Court justice in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur in the mid 1980s. Yun Ling has had, by every measure, a remarkable and successful life despite extreme hardship and loss. She was born to privilege, as a member of a wealthy Straits Chinese family, but at the age of 17 she and her older sister Yun Hong were captured by Japanese soldiers and taken to a prison camp hidden within the jungle of the Malayan Peninsula. The prisoners were brutally tortured there, and only one survived at the end of the war: Yun Ling.After she completes her law studies in England, she returns to Malaysia to practice, serving as a prosecutor for the Malayan government in the trials of captured Japanese Army soldiers. Her sister's death continues to haunt her, and she decides to honor her sister's memory by building a Japanese garden, as Yun Hong loved them dearly. In 1951 she returns to the home of a family friend, Magnus Pretorius, a South African tea planter in Cameron Highlands in the Malayan state of Pahang, whose friend Nakamura Aritomo is a highly regarded gardener—and the former chief gardener to Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Yun Ling struggles to overcome her deep hatred of the Japanese, and works under Aritomo as an apprentice, helping him to rebuild his own garden while learning the craft from him. However, the tranquil mountainous setting also hosts the Malayan National Liberation Army, a group of communist guerrilla soldiers who are at war with the colonial government during the Malayan Emergency. Colonists such as Pretorius are frequent targets of the guerrillas, subject to robbery, assault and murder, but Yun Ling is also at great risk, as she also prosecuted captured guerrillas after the war trials had concluded, and the communists in the area are aware of her presence there. As Yun Ling becomes closer to Aritomo, she learns more about the hidden roles he assumed during the Japanese occupation, as she seeks to discover what happened to the other prisoners in the camp, and to achieve closure and inner peace with herself, her family and with him.The novel is filled with numerous additional characters, story lines and themes, which delicately intersect and overlap each other. Certain seemingly insignificant events in the early and middle sections of the book become clearer as the book progresses, as Eng masterfully creates a story that requires close attention from the reader, similar to that which is necessary to understand and appreciate the finer aspects of a Japanese garden. The Garden of Evening Mists is an almost indescribably beautiful, rich and rewarding novel with multiple layers that are expertly weaved into a coherent work of art. Tan Twan Eng deserves to be commended for this astonishing work, which would be a worthy winner of this year's Booker Prize.
    • 5/5
      Another five-star read. Set in Malaya/Malaysia at a number of different points in time, this is the story of Teoh Yun Ling, who "never changed the order of [her] name" and had "never taken on an English name just to make it easier for anyone." The sole survivor of a Japanese war camp, she comes to the Cameron Highlands in search of solitude, solace, and an opportunity to create the Japanese garden dreamed of by her perished and beloved sister. Her relationship with Aritomo, the former gardener of the emperor of Japan, is a beautiful illustration of the healing power of one relationship. In one relationship history, culture, identity, and devastating trauma can lose ground against the intimacy, compassion, deep authenticity, and forgiveness. In one relationship fractured memory can come together into a mended but imperfect vessel of deeper truths than the reality of one or a hundred horrific events. Sound hokey? Not in the least. This novel is beautifully written. It highlights the tremendous capacity of the human spirit for healing without a moment's flinching away from the brutal physical, emotional, and spiritual assaults we will unleash on one another. The novel is also a beautiful exploration of the nature of memory. Yun Ling has been diagnosed with a degenerative disease that will eventually deprive her of her memory. Her fear is palpable. The urgency with which she works to resolve some of the questions that have plagued her since her narrow escape from the panicked mass murder executed on her sister and others in the war camp is only slightly tempered by a peaceful acceptance of the inevitable. Some of Tan Twan Eng's loveliest passages are those regarding memory: "Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again."And later, when a friend asks her whether she remembers the paper lanterns Aritomo made for another friend: "She empties out a sigh from deep within her. 'My memory is like the moon tonight, full and bright, so bright you can see all its scars.'Beautiful.
    • 4/5
      The novel is told as a race against the narrator's "quicksand of memory". The Japanese occupation of Malaysia is told from a very unique perspective and ultimately becomes a character study of Aritomo, the emperor's gardener. Gardening, tea drinking, and tattooing are exploited for all of the symbolism the author can squeeze out of them. Sometimes this is a bit overdone, but the historical setting is vivid enough to dominate the overall impression.
    • 4/5
      "On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan." So begins The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, the author of the excellent Gift of Rain. Teoh Yun Ling is a "Straits Chinese" who grew up in Malaya (Malaysia). Thanks to her sister Yun Hong, she came to love Japanese gardens. An idyllic existence is interrupted by WWII, and the overrunning of Malaysia by the Japanese. Yun Ling and her sister are then taken to a prison camp, and life will never be the same.After the war Yun Ling returns to the hilltop where she grew up, and wishes to create a Japanese garden like the ones she and her sister once loved. But to do so would require the help of a skilled Japanese gardener and "They'd have to hang their emperor first before I'd ask for help from any of them." Nonetheless, to fulfill a promise to herself, she has to approach Nakamura Aritomo, the Emperor's former gardener mentioned at the opening of the book. He is creating a beautiful Japanese garden nearby, named Yuguri. He resists her initially. "The girl who had once walked the gardens of Kyoto with her sister, that girl, is she still there?" Eventually Yung Ling becomes his apprentice. To him she brings an understanding of Japan's atrocities in the war, and their devastating effects on their victims. To her he brings an understanding of the tranquility, peace and beauty of the Japanese arts, especially the art of gardening embodied by Yuguri.This potent mix informs the whole book, and their relationship deepens over time. Meanwhile, "CTs", terrorists, are still rampaging the Malaysian countryside, killing and stealing. Only in Yuguri do Yun Ling and Aritomo feel safe from the chaos around them. And even that is not immune to the times."'A garden borrows from the earth, the sky and everything around it, but you borrow from time,' I said slowly. 'Your memories are a form of shakkei too. You bring them in to make your life here feel less empty. Like the mountains and the clouds over your garden, you can see them, but they will always be out of your reach.'His eyes turned bleak. I had overstepped the bounds between us. 'It is the same with you,' he said a moment later. 'Your old life, too, is gone. You are here, borrowing from your sister's dreams, searching for what you have lost.'"There are many moments of great beauty in this book, and many moments of great depth. I loved this one from a conversation between the two of them, in which they've digressed to thinking of the timeless Garden of Eden from quite different perspectives (Aritomo's is unexpected and perfectly in character). In the end he observes, "When the first man and the first woman were banished from their home, Time also was set loose upon the world." I'll be thinking about that one for a long time to come.Some have found the author's voice too unprepossessing in this novel, but for me it suited the story well. His handling of cultural, interpersonal, and personal complexities is as masterful as Aritomo's command of the subtleties of the Japanese garden. In the end, Yun Ling keeps two out of three life-directing promises she made herself. Her decisions regarding the third are as haunting and complex as her life's story, and Aritomo's. This is an unforgettable offering from one of our most talented writers.
    • 5/5
      At the beginning of The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, Yun Ling retires from a distinguished career as a judge. She returns to the Malaysian highlands to the home of a Japanese man who was the gardener to the Japanese emperor before moving to Malaysia before WWII. Suffering from an illness that will eventually rob her of the power to write and speak, Yun Ling starts the project of recording her life history before she can no longer remember it. Over the course of this lush and epic novel, Yun Ling remembers the Japanese occupation of Malaysia during World War II, which resulted in her and her sister’s internment in a Japanese work camp hidden deep in the jungles of Malaysia. After escaping the camp, Yun Ling stayed with her uncle on a highlands tea estate. The famous Japanese gardener, Aritomo, lived next door amid his beautiful garden. To honor her deceased sister’s love of Japanese gardening, Yun Ling asks Aritomo to design a garden in her sister’s name. Aritomo refuses the request but asks Yun Ling to become his apprentice.In a few short paragraphs, it is utterly impossible to explain the nuances of this beautiful story. The horrors of the Japanese occupation of Malaysia during WWII, the continuing violence in Malaysia after the war at the hands of Communist Chinese terrorists (“The Malaysian Emergency”), the evolving relationships between people who used to be enemies, the peace-inspiring art of Japanese gardening, and the beauty and fragility of the natural world combine to create a novel that seems to encompass every human condition and emotion. Eng’s writing style is elegant and understated, but also very powerful. My money is on this book to win this year’s Booker Prize.
    • 5/5
      The imminent rain in the air smelt crisp and metallic, as though it had been seared by the lightning buried in the clouds. The scent reminded me of the time in the camp, when my mind had latched onto the smallest, most inconsequential thing to distract myself: a butterfly wafting from a patch of scrub, a spiderweb tethered to twigs by strands of silk, sieving the wind for insects. – from The Garden of Evening Mists, page 100 -Teoh Yun Ling has retired from her profession as a judge and returned to the mountains of Malaya forty years after having been imprisoned by the Japanese during WWII. On the edge of the rain forest, beneath the mists of the mountain, and beside the rolling hills of a tea plantation she writes a story before her memory fades because Yun Ling has been diagnosed with a devastating illness, primary progressive aphasia, which will steal her memories and her language. Yun Ling’s story is a complex one. It is the story of captivity at the hands of brutal soldiers and the loss of her sister. It is about her desire to honor her sister’s memory with a garden crafted by the former gardener of the Emperor of Japan, a man named Nakamura Aritomo who is dignified, talented and mysterious. It is about the year she spends with Aritomo as his apprentice, physically laboring in his amazing garden as their relationship grows more intimate. It is about the impact of war – first the war in the Pacific, and then the Malayan Emergency. But most importantly, it is about finding oneself again, teasing through memories long buried and discovering the secrets that lie just below the surface.He turned to me, touching the side of his head lightly. At that moment it struck me that he was similar to the boulders on which we had spent the entire morning working. Only a small portion was revealed to the world, the rest was buried deep within, hidden from view. – from The Garden of Evening Mists, page 99 -Tan Twan Eng’s second novel is an alluring one, filled with exquisite description of the Malayan countryside against the backdrop of violence.The days here opened from beyond one set of mountains and ended behind another, and I came to think of Yugiri as a place lodged somewhere in a crease between daybreak and sunset. – from The Garden of Evening Mists, page 109 -Yun Ling’s inner struggle to come to terms with the trauma (both physical and emotional) which she endured at the hands of the Japanese is illuminated through a narrative which moves back and forth in time between the 1940s when Yun Ling is a child, to 1950 when she returns to Malaya as a young adult, and many years later when Yun Ling is an older woman. Yun Ling’s voice carries the reader through several important historical events:-The Second Sino-Japanese War (July 7, 1937 – September 2, 1945)-The Japanese Invasion of Malaya (also called the Battle of Kota Bharu) which began December 8, 1941 before the attack on Pearl Harbor (this is the period of time when Yun Ling is captured and held as a prisoner by the Japanese).-The Malayan Emergency which was a guerrilla war fought between Commonwealth armed forces and the Malayan National Liberation Army (the military arm of the Malayan Communist Party) from 1948 to 1960.The central themes in the novel is that of memory – how memory can be healing and how it can change with time. Yun Ling’s memories of her time in captivity are ones she has worked most of her life to forget. But now she is facing the loss of all her memories, and she is struggling to remember.I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void. – from The Garden of Evening Mists, page 33 -Eng uses the garden with its hidden secrets and surprising twists and views, as a metaphor for memory. Aritomo uses the concept of shakkei – a way of borrowing the landscape and other elements to enhance the beauty of the garden – and Yun Ling makes the connection between this style of gardening to that of memory:‘A garden borrows from the earth, the sky, and everything around it, but you borrow from time,’ I said slowly. ‘Your memories are a form of shakkei too. You bring them in to make your life here feel less empty. Like the mountains and the clouds over your garden, you can see them, but they will always be out of your reach.’ – from The Garden of Evening Mists, page 153 -This idea of memory as elusive and related to the natural world permeates the novel.Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again. – from The Garden of Evening Mists, page 309 -Other themes explored in the book are recovery from trauma, nationalism, and the impact of war on individuals.Eng’s prose is often dreamlike and elegant. His shifts in narrative allow for the reader to discover Yun Ling’s inner journey and adds complexity to the other characters who are uncovered gradually through Yun Ling’s memories of them and the events which unfurl.The Garden of Evening Mists is a quiet novel at times with the action being more about Yun Ling’s inner growth and dawning perceptions of Aritomo. But there are also some graphic descriptions of the violence which rocked this region. When Yun Ling takes the reader back to the years of her captivity, I found it hard to catch my breath.Eng’s writing is gorgeous. He demonstrates a deep understanding about how events shape our lives and how the natural world is intricately enmeshed with who we are as humans. He also understands the complexity of people – the multiple layers which make up our lives and the hidden secrets we all carry.The Garden of Evening Mists is a literary treat. Readers who love literary fiction will find themselves pulled into this introspective and exquisitely written novel.Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      I love a lyrical historical novel, and this one does not disappoint. Set in Malaysia, it recalls the time of Japanese occupation when many residents, including Teoh Yun Ling and her older sister were interned in prison work camps. Yun Ling survived and was working in Kuala Lumpur as a judge when the Japan Peace Treaty was signed. Outraged about the lenient terms, she was asked to leave her position because her bitter comments were reported by the press. She returns to her sanctuary, Yuguri, in the Highlands and decides to write down her memories because she is slowly losing them due to a neurological disease. Sounds a bit contrived, doesn't it? Perhaps it is, but when we learn that her memories center around a Japanese Garden, it makes more sense. One of my favorite passages is applied to a garden, though when I read it, it reminded me of the way I feel about some of my treasured books: "The garden has to reach inside you. It should change your heart, sadden it, uplift it. It has to make you appreciate the impermanence of everything in life. That point in time just as the last leaf is about to drop, as the remaining petal is about to fall; that moment captures everything beautiful and sorrowful about life." Sublime writing like this made the book fall into the company of other books that transport me to a magical place where I can experience a book's reality as my own.Yun Ling's story is about an unlikely friendship between herself, a Chinese woman who had been tortured by the Japanese, and Aritomo, who had been the Japanese Emperor Hirohito's gardener. Yun Ling wanted Aritomo to design a Japanese garden in memory of her sister who had died in the prison camp. He refused but offered her a job as his apprentice which led to… Well, I think I'll stop right there and urge you to read this one for yourself. Just as every step inside The Garden of Evening Mists is meant to "open your mind, to lead you to the heart of a contemplative state," I hope you find the same sort of peace that I did in the juxtaposition of terror and the beauty of nature. In addition to meandering through three different time periods in Yun Ling's life, we follow her complexity of emotions through a rich history of war, ethnic conflicts, and communist guerrilla fighters in the mountains of Malaysia. She vacillated between numbness, anger, and forgiveness. The variety of Japanese art stands out against this harsh backdrop just as the view of the distant mountains catches a visitor by surprise as they stroll through the controlled beauty of the garden. Sorry, it is difficult to write about this extraordinary book without speaking metaphorically. Even if it doesn't win the Booker Prize, it will take top billing in my list of 85 books read so far this year.
    • 5/5
      What a joy for the reader to unfold layer upon layer of narrative in this Booker-nominated novel. Set in the Cameron Highlands, outside of Kuala Lumpur, it is told by Yun Ling Teoh, sole survivor of a Japanese prison camp during WWII. In 1951, she returns to the area and, in an ironic twist, becomes an apprentice to a famed Japanese gardener Aritomo, exiled gardener to the Emperor Hirohito. Before the monsoons come, she helps to reconstruct his garden, Yugiri, and despite her hatred of the Japanese, is increasingly drawn to the inscrutable gardener. She expects that she will be able to construct a Japanese garden in memory of her sister, who died in the prison camp. All this takes place as the Communist terrorists are posing a threat to all those living in the highlands.In evocative prose, Eng takes us back and forth in time, as the garden takes its place at the center of the novel and comes to represent memories, which make up the main theme of the book. Fast forward thirty years, and Yun Ling has been struck by a neurological disorder that is destroying her memory. And there are many mysteries she would like to solve before her memory is gone completely. She still does not know who Aritomo really is and why he was exiled from Japan? Why was her friend Magnus always so sure of his safety as the Communists targeted other neighbors? What is the story behind “Yamashita’s Gold” and is it fact or fiction? And is she hiding something herself? How did she become the lone survivor of a prison camp that no one will acknowledge existed?But time and again it’s Eng’s superlative prose that makes the narrative sing:”Bats are flooding out from the hundreds of caves that perforate these mountainsides. I watch them plunge into the mists without any hesitation, trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly. Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analyzing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?” (Page 307)Lovely, isn’t it? Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Having suffered through a Japanese slave-camp during WWII, Yun Ling Teoh, a young Chinese-descent lawyer in Malaysia, carries around a lot of anger against the Japanese. However, she'd made a promise to her deceased sister that she would build a Japanese garden, so she reluctantly visits Aritomo - the only Japanese gardener in Malaysia. Aritomo refuses to design a garden for Yun Ling, but he offers to take her on as his apprentice so that she may design one herself. Yun Ling learns to let go of her anger as her friendship with Aritomo grows. But Aritomo has his own secrets. How can I express what an amazing book this was? Sure, it had a couple of slowish spots (it WAS, after all, a book about gardening) but the story is magical. The historical and cultural backdrop is intriguing (I learned a lot while reading, but didn't feel like I was being "taught"). Because the book takes place in two different times (current day and shortly after WWII), the story unfolds gracefully - allowing the reader to learn the story of Aritomo and Yun Ling at just the right rate...but yet somehow the time also blends together giving an impression of continuity that is particular to Eastern philosophy. On top of that, the more I learned about the story, the more fascinated I was by the two characters. This book is definitely worth your time.