Two reviews of Tan's The Garden of Evening Mists

---

In Me, You, and Books:

“An exquisite novel flowing around a mysterious Japanese garden in the highlands of Malaysia and narrated by a Chinese woman scarred by her experiences in a Japanese concentration camp during World War II. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012.

Tan is a superb writer able to create a multi-layered novel involving the stories of diverse characters and spanning three time periods. He has woven the stories told by his varied characters into a flowing mediation on gardening, memory, illusion and loss. The narrator is Yun Ling, a Malaysian women of Chinese descent. In the most recent layer of the story, health threats cause her to retire her judgeship and return to the plantation and Japanese garden in the Malaysian highlands where she had lived for a time thirty years before. Once there, she begins collecting her own memories. Many of them deal with the earlier time when she had lived at the tea plantation of friends and worked with the Japanese gardener, Aritomo, the former gardener of the Emperor of Japan. Although still bitter toward the Japanese, Ling had agreed to be his apprentice in order to create a garden honoring her sister who died when they were both imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp. As Yun Ling had labored in the garden, she had calmed and healed. Her relationship with the mysterious Aritomo had deepened in surprising ways. She dug more deeply into the past and told of her own scarring experiences in the camp”

Read more…

---

In Counterpunch «conclusion»:

“I’ve circled around much of the story, identifying the surface realities of Tan Twan Eng’s enchanting novel, short-listed for this year’s Man Booker Award. There are mysteries to be uncovered here, elegantly woven into a story of great beauty and formality, whether they are the Japanese gardens (the Art of Setting Stones and the Deception of Borrowed Scenery) or the equally detailed references to tea ceremonies and, to a lesser extent, tea cultivation. Even tattooing, as it relates to ritual, class, and artistry becomes important as Aritomo’s secret past slowly unfolds for Teoh Yun Ling (as well as the reader). The Garden of Evening Mists levitates above the surface reality of war and its terrible atrocities and floats, hauntingly, like a Japanese lantern up into the sky.”

Read more…

---

Reviews of The Garden of Mists on this site.

---