Garden of Evening Mists (Eng)

The Garden of Evening Mists
Tan Twan Eng, 2012
Weinstein Publishing
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781602861800


Summary
Malaya, 1949. After studying law at Cambrige and time spent helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, Yun Ling Teoh, herself the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle fringed plantations of Northern Malaya where she grew up as a child. 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 Kuala Lumpur, 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 her sensei and his art while, outside the garden, the threat of murder and kidnapping from the guerrillas of the jungle hinterland increases with each passing day.

But the Garden of Evening Mists is also a place of mystery. Who is Aritomo and how did he come to leave Japan? Why is it that Yun Ling's friend and host Magnus Praetorius, seems to almost immune from the depredations of the Communists? What is the legend of "Yamashita's Gold" and does it have any basis in fact? And is the real story of how Yun Ling managed to survive the war perhaps the darkest secret of all? (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Tan worked as an intellectual property lawyer in Kuala Lumpur before becoming a full-time writer. He has a first-dan ranking in aikido and currently lives in Cape Town.

His first novel, The Gift of Rain, was published in 2007 and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize that year. It is set in Penang in the years before and during the Japanese occupation of Malaya in World War II. The Gift of Rain has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Greek, Romanian, Czech, Serbian and French.

His second novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, was published in 2012. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012.

Tan has spoken at literary festivals, including the Singapore Writers Festival, the Ubud Writers' Festival in Bali, the Asia Man Booker Festival in Hong Kong, the Shanghai International Literary Festival, the Perth Writers Festival, the Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne, Australia, and the Franschhoek Literary Festival in South Africa. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Beautifully written.... Eng is quite simply one of the best novelists writing today.
Philadelphia Inquirer


The Garden of Evening Mists...plumbs the basics of human nature as it asks how we can commit so many atrocities in a time of war and, at the same time, create compelling, transcendent works of art.... This novel uses fine art as its major theme and, in the process, becomes a work of fine art itself.
Carolyn See - Washington Post


The Garden of Evening Mists offers action-packed, end-of-empire storytelling in the vein of Tan’s compatriot Tash Aw. His fictional garden cultivates formal harmony but also undermines it. It unmasks sophisticated artistry as a partner of pain and lies. This duality invests the novel with a climate of doubt; a mood, as with Aritomo’s creation, of “tension and possibility”. Its beauty never comes to rest.”
Independent


After having endured the miseries of a Japanese internment camp during WWII, 28-year-old Yun Ling Teoh makes her way in 1951 to the only Japanese garden in her native Malaya in a bid to convince its caretaker, Nakamura Aritomo, the former gardener for the Emperor of Japan, to establish a commemorative plot for her sister who died in the camp. Though he initially refuses, Aritomo agrees to mentor Yun Ling so that she might design the garden herself. While toiling away in Yugiri, the titular "garden of evening mists," Yun Ling grows fond of Aritomo, meanwhile recalling the horrors of the camp and the difficulties of the post-WWII "Emergency" in Malaya, a prolonged period of guerrilla war whose reach creeps closer by the day. Alternating between her time with Aritomo and a future wherein the now-aged Yun Ling, fighting a degenerative brain disease, desperately seeks to preserve her memories of the garden, Eng's newest (after The Gift of Rain) has the makings of a moving and unique historical, but the novel falls flat. There is a puzzling lack of pathos, and Eng's similar treatment of the tragic and the mundane serves to downplay rather than highlight the differences between the two. As a result, there is very little—other than Eng's moving atmospherics and attention to detail—to draw readers along.
Publishers Weekly


Like his debut, The Gift of Rain (2007), Tan’s second novel is exquisite.... Tan triumphs again, entwining the redemptive power of storytelling with the elusive search for truth, all the while juxtaposing Japan’s inhumane war history with glorious moments of Japanese art and philosophy. All readers in search of spectacular writing will not be disappointed.
Library Journal


As intricately designed as a Japanese garden, this deceptively quiet novel resonates with the power to inspire a variety of passionate emotions.... A haunting novel certain to stay with the reader long after the book is closed.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Memory is one of the main themes of The Garden of Evening Mists. How does Tan Twan Eng use the garden as a metaphor for memory?

2. Tan Twan Eng said his novel was difficult to write

... because Yun Ling very much wanted to keep her secrets to herself. Because of what she had gone through, and what she had become, no one was allowed into her head. And yet at the same time she wanted to—she had to—reveal those secrets. It was a constant battle for me to crack her open.

Given this statement, do you get the sense that Yun Ling is a reluctant narrator?

3. Does Yun Ling’s disposition towards Aritomo and towards the Japanese in general undergo a significant shift in the course of the novel, or does she rather maintain a constant though compartmentalised attitude throughout?

4. How and to what extent has Yun Ling’s capacity for intimate love and affection in later life been affected by her experiences in the internment camp and or her shared time with Aritomo?

5. Although containing many violent scenes, readers have commented that they found the story comforting, leaving a feeling of calm and tranquillity. What feelings are you left with having completed the novel?
(Questions from the Man Book Prize website.)

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