One of the reasons why I was intrigued by this book was the subject matter.
Amidst the violence, Yugiri is a tranquil place of calm and as the garden is reborn, Yun Ling is awakened to the mystery of why Aritomo, exiled from his homeland, remains here. Malaya is undergoing an upheaval as Chinese communists fight against their British colonial rulers and as the violence encroaches upon Yugiri and the neighbouring Majuba Tea Estate, Yun Ling must once again face her fear and guilt. Yun Ling, scarred, angry, traumatised and the sole survivor of her Japanese prison camp, soon becomes Aritomo’s apprentice and, through her stay with him, learns to overcome some of her trauma through the discipline of learning how to create a Japanese garden. Several years after WWII, a young Straits Chinese woman arrives at Yugiri (which means evening mist in Japanese), intent on persuading Aritomo to create a Japanese garden in memory of her sister who had died in a Japanese slave camp during the war.
The Garden of the Evening Mists centres around Yugiri, a garden in the highlands of Malaya created by Emperor Hirohito’s last gardener, Nakamura Aritomo. And so it proved until the very last page. The style of writing, the content, the balance was just right. As soon as I started reading, I felt that little pressure in my head that told me that this was a book I was going to love. So naturally I was interested in his latest offering, The Garden of the Evening Mists, and was pleased to be invited to participate in the blog tour.Īnd what a book. And then I was lucky enough to attend a talk he gave at the Galle Literary Festival in 2011 and found him to be both eloquent and thoughtful.
Tan Twan Eng has been on my radar for quite a while now every since I first heard about The Gift of Rain a few years ago.
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