I read this book when it was shortlisted for the (then) Man Booker prize back in 2012. A friend recently mentioned that she’d just read it and found it “beautiful” so that inspired me to go back to it.
My friend is right. It is indeed beautiful because it presents art (garden design, painting and more) as a symbol of reconciliation in a world where unspeakably cruel – evil – things have happened quite recently but where loyalties and judgements are not always black and white.
It’s a first person narrative, set in Malaya (now Malaysia) which darts back and forth in time. In the present (early 1990s) Yun Ling, with a successful career in law and as a judge behind her, returns to the Cameron Highlands after 40 years away, She is ill (aphasia) and her memory is fading so she wants to record her past.
Her past was, we learn, bound up with a world famous Japanese garden designer named Aritomo, She seems to have inherited his house and now neglected garden at Yugiri. She has two fingers missing and is carrying another unlikely secret on her body which isn’t revealed until the last few chapters of the novel.
The narrative recalls her visit to the area in the early 1950s when she wants to ask Aritomo to design a memorial garden for her sister Yun Hong – this despite a profound loathing for all Japanese. Eventually she reveals exactly what happened to her and her sister when she were incarcerated in a Japanese prison camp during the war. And it’s quite hard to read. It is possible that Yun Ling’s present illness is a result of what happened to her 40 years before. Her doctor tells her that no one is yet quite sure.
Now, to digress: My father-in-law, George, then just a boy of 20, was in Malaya as a young conscript in 1945. He saw some of those those camps as they were opened at the end of the war. He never told any of us the details but his eyes would glaze if anyone mentioned Japan or the Japanese and for decades, until it became almost impossible to avoid, he refused to buy, or give house room to, anything made in Japan. So I have long been aware of the appalling, literally unspeakable, things which happened in Japanese-occupied countries. Tan Twan Eng, himself a Malaysian, spells it out via his narrator.
Second, and much more trivially, I have been, as a tourist, to the Cameron Highlands, an area in the west of Malaysia roughly midway between Kuala Lumpur and Penang. We spent several days in this now peaceful place where we walked round, and ate several meals in, the village of Tanah Rata (which features a lot in The Garden of Evening Mists), visited a Buddhist temple and drank tea overlooking a tea plantation which means that I can, in a small way, visualise the ambience of the setting.
In the nineteen fifties Malaya, still under British rule, was a country of conflicts and emergency with a lot of brutal terrorism. Yun Ling has to face this when she goes to Yugiri where she becomes Aritomo’s garden apprentice. Eventually, a pretty complicated relationship develops between them including the ultimate (and rather unexpected) act of trust. Do you know what a horimono is? If not you will after you’ve read this powerful, disturbing – and yes, beautiful – novel.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Man I Think I Know by Mike Gayle
