Play Book Tag discussion

I have had The Garden of Evening Mists on my TBR for as long as I can remember. It gets such wonderful reviews and is a genre I typically enjoy. I tried at least four times over the years to read it but could never get beyond the first few chapters. This year I promised myself I would finally make it a priority. As usual, I had trouble getting into it but kept pushing and once I got a quarter of the way through, I couldn't bear to put it down.

The narrator is the taciturn Supreme Court Judge Teoh Yun Ling, who prosecuted war criminals in the 1950s and who has just retired as a judge in Kuala Lumpur in the modern day storyline. She is the sole survivor of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. She despises all things Japanese, except for their gardens.

There are two storylines. The first storyline is in 1951, and she returns to her childhood home in the Cameron Highlands of Malaya. She plans to approach Nakamura Aritomo, famous for being the Emperor's gardener. Her request to Aritomo is simple: build a garden for her sister who perished in the camp and who loved the gardens of Kyoto. They form an unlikely relationship. The second storyline is her return thirty years later after her retirement. Well written flashbacks fill out the story.

There are several important secondary characters who are, to some degree, morally ambiguous. There is a former South African slave owner who champions the rights of the native Malay and Malaysian Chinese, a Japanese art scholar haunted by the memory of the lover who took his place in a kamikaze jet, and several characters with a postwar hatred of the Japanese.

The book has obviously been very well researched, and I felt I learned a lot about post-colonial Malaya. We are immersed in a world filled with political tension, as the indigenous Malay people, Chinese immigrants and Europeans are all vying to be heard in the country's new government. Chinese communist guerillas are hiding in the jungle and commit scores of atrocities to further their cause, and Malay becomes a very unstable and dangerous place to live. These tensions provide a rich backdrop to the novel, which tells of the very worst of humanity alongside its descriptions of great beauty.

The narration is subdued and meditative even though the narrator is in a perpetual state of repressed anger. The plot unfolds gradually but with purpose, like the building and rebuilding of the garden itself.

"The Garden of Evening Mists" is beautifully written, thought provoking, mysterious, and heartbreaking. I'm so glad I finally had a chance to enjoy it.

I didn’t immediately connect with it at first either. It’s been a long time and I occasionally imagine myself in the environment, with the misty light and the aroma of tea or flowers.