Judge Yun Ling Teoh, a former prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp at the age of 19 during World War II, is at the centre of the novel. When the narrative opens she has just resigned from her post a little earlier than her retirement date. She moves to the Malayan highlands to live in Yugiri, or ‘the garden of evening mists’. The plot consists of her memories from the past, including the years when she was a prisoner along with her elder sister, and the time she spent in Yugiri in the 1950s, “a place lodged somewhere in a crease between daybreak and sunset.”
Haunted by the painful memories of the prison camp, Yun Ling spends her life trying to escape the past: “I tried not to think about it as I went about my days … But occasionally memories still found their way in.” As the novel opens we are told that the reason for her early retirement is a kind of aphasia. Yun Ling is terrified of this prospect, “for what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.” This sudden clash between her efforts to forget the scars from the past and a desire to preserve her memories results in the re-evaluation of her life.
The main narrative takes place in Yugiri where Yun Ling (of Chinese origin), who hates the Japanese for what they did to her family (her elder sister died in the concentration camp and her mother lost her memory and lucidity as a result), works as an apprentice to the Japanese gardener Nakamura Aritomo. Yun Ling’s sister’s love for Japanese gardens, which she saw before the war, helps both sisters bear the cruelties of the soldiers. Yun Ling decides to build a Japanese garden in memory of her dead sister and that’s how she meets Aritomo, a man who would later become her lover. However, she can’t rid herself of survivor’s guilt.
She is not the only one suffering from guilt, though. The post-colonial guilt of the Japanese is embodied in the character of Yoshikawa Tatsuji, a historian who served as a pilot during the war. After the war he became obsessed with the crimes committed in the name of the nation and “wanted to fill in the silence that was stifling every family of [his] generation.” Tatsuji contacts Yun Ling during the late 1980s because he wants to write a book about Aritomo’s art of wood-block printing.
Aritomo’s is an elusive character that Yun Ling fails to completely understand. She describes their peculiar but doomed relationship thus: “We were like two moths around a candle, I thought, circling closer and closer to the flame, waiting to see whose wings would catch fire first.”
Aritomo is a master of the art of borrowed scenery, “taking elements and views from outside a garden and making them integral to his creation.” He instructs Yun Ling: “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.” But he never lets her write down his techniques, telling her that the garden will remember them for her. Aritomo, besides gardening and wood-block printing, is also a master of the art of archery. But most surprising is the revelation that he is also a master of the taboo art of tattoo-making.
The Garden of Evening Mists is such a pleasantly atmospheric novel that I was completely engrossed in the spectacular Malayan scenery, painted through remarkable colours that only make reality more fantastic. It won’t be far from truth to say that Yugiri is more fascinating than the characters.
Although human endurance in the face of numerous pains is one of the novel’s central motifs, its supreme concern is the impermanence of human experience. The constantly changing political scenario in the novel contributes towards the theme of human impermanence. Memory, the focal source of individual histories and feelings, appears deceptive and short-lived: “A memory drifts by. I reach for it, as if I am snatching at a leaf spiraling down from a high branch.” Tan Twan Eng seems to tell his readers that when all hope is lost and human connections are severed, nature provides us with the only comfort possible.
The Garden of Evening Mists(NOVEL)By Tan Twan EngWeinstein Books, USISBN 1602861803352pp.