Yugiri became a living memorial to her sister.Īritomo is escaping a troubled past of his own and, until almost the very end of the novel the Japanese gardener remains an enigmatic figure. At the end of the war, to honor the memory of her lost sister who loved Japanese gardens, Yun Ling took up a gardening apprenticeship with Aritomo.

Her sister didn't survive the ordeal, leaving Yun Ling with a profound sense of survivor's guilt which haunts this beautiful novel. In chapters that alternate rather abruptly between the present and the past, the reader witnesses Yun Ling's trauma as she and her older sister suffer the horrors of internment at the hands of the Japanese. Aritomo is now long gone and the garden, bequeathed to Yun Ling, has sunk into neglect.Īs Yun Ling gets the garden going and tries to sort out Aritomo's legacy, she is haunted by visions from her past when Malaysia, then a British colony, was invaded by the Japanese during the Second World War. It was created by Nakamura Aritomo, an enigmatic Japanese man who once worked in his country's Imperial gardens. One of the most beautiful things in her past is Yugiri, the garden of evening mists, and Yun Ling works at documenting how this garden came into being. 'Yun Ling has been recently diagnosed with aphasia and she retires so that she can document her past while she still has a fairly firm grip on her faculties. It is the late '80s and Yun Ling, a prominent Supreme Court justice in independent Malaysia has just retired and moved back from Kuala Lumpur, the country's capital, to her home in the country's highlands. This vignette might well capture the premise of this fantastic novel by Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng - that we spend almost our entire lives trying to find harmony between the twin pillars of memory and forgetfulness. The other one, Teoh Yun Ling is told, is her twin, the goddess of forgetting. It is only fitting that one of them is Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory. In Tan Twan Eng's second novel, after The Gift of Rain, he continues to explore the harmony between the twin pillars of memory and forgetfulness, set against the backdrop of late 1980s Malaysia.Įarly on in the evocative new novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, the protagonist Teoh Yun Ling comes across an arresting pair of statues in her friend's tea estate gardens.

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