Book Review: The Garden of Evening Mists

 

Today, I have a book review for you written by Kate Reynolds, author of Ernestine, a fine historical fiction novel. The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng sounds like a great read. Let's see what Ms Reynolds has to say about the book

The Garden of Evening Mists, by Tan Twan Eng, is one of those books that likely will haunt a reader in the wee, small hours of the morning. For one thing, it’s beautifully written, featuring clear-eyed, understated prose and an engrossing story that casts light on a time and place few westerners really know. (Well, this westerner didn’t know much about either the time or the place.) For another, the theme – memory – with all its wistful sweetness and thorns, reminds us that time flees too quickly for all of us. This is a story of looking back, of understanding and coming to terms with the past.

The place is Malaya in 1951. Yun Ling Teoh is a judge retiring from her years on the bench in Kuala Lumpur. She has served on the War Crimes Tribunal, exacting justice for atrocities committed in the years when the Japanese occupied Malaya. But the judge is hardly a disinterested party. She, along with her beloved sister, had been prisoners in one of those same cruel Japanese prison camps. Judge Teoh is deeply scarred, physically and emotionally. She survived the camps. Her sister did not.

The reader learns that Judge Teoh has been diagnosed with aphasia, which will soon bring about a loss of ability to express herself or understand words. She will lose her memories as well. 

The judge decides to compose her memoirs in her former home in the Cameron Highlands near the Majuba Tea Estate. It is in this account of Judge Teo’s life that a reader is introduced to her former mentor, Aritomo, a Japanese master gardener and artist. Some years back, Judge Teoh had asked this man to create a garden in honor of her dead sister, despite memories of the cruelty she suffered in prison. The judge writes of how she had to swallow her hatred of the Japanese to ask her former enemy for help. But Aritomo is, after all, an accomplished gardener, and what better way to remember Judge Teoh’s sister than to create a lovely garden that will live forever? After all, “Gardens were created to approximate the idea of a paradise in the afterlife.”

In creating a Japanese garden, Judge Teoh must face her hatred of all things Japanese and her own dark memories. Her relationship with Aritomo, the master gardener, takes unexpected turns throughout the novel.

The story weaves back and forth in time between the years she spent with Aritomo in his garden and the present when she knows her own life is ending. In unlocking the past, Judge Teoh faces her own frailties and the terrible failures in her past. 

I found the time switches confusing at times, and my own unfamiliarity with Malaya made it hard to connect with the geography. But when The Garden of Evening Mists wanders back and forth in time, slowing peeling back the layers to Judge Teoh’s life and secrets, I am spellbound. Read it for the elegant language or read it for the history or read it for insight into Eastern culture. But do read it.