I must admit, gardening is not really my thing, I do
appreciate a beautiful garden and I have seen a number of Japanese gardens in
my time, obviously without fully appreciating the abstract message being
conveyed. This novel is a contemplative one, hence the week or so since I
finished it before getting to this review. It was a slow read, only due to the
fact that I was letting it slowly sink in, as I’m sure Tan Twan Eng intended.
Set in Malaya in the mountains we have our narrator Yun Ling
Teoh returning to the gardens of the evening mist to relive her story of being
apprenticed to Nakamura Aritomo, a former gardener of the Emperor of Japan. Judge
Teoh is a former war criminals prosecutor who had spent time in a Japanese
prisoner of war camp, where her sister perished. She despises the Japanese for
those atrocities but at the same time her story of her relationship with Aritomo
and her wish of building a garden for her sister’s memory is slowly drip fed to
us. Her time working Aritomo’s garden (Yugiri) and her relationship with the
gardener and the locals is revealed slowly through the mists of her
recollections.
At each turn in the path, Aritomo
drew my attention to an arrangement of rocks, an unusual sculpture, or a stone
lantern. They looked as if they had been lying there on the beds of moss and
ferns for centuries. ‘These objects signal to the traveller that he is entering
another layer of his journey,’ he said. ‘They tell him to stop and gather his
thoughts, to savour the view.’
And our story unfolds in this manner, long winding passages
with detailed descriptions of leaves, or clouds and then the occasional blooming
of Judge Teoh’s story, we as readers have entered another layer of our journey.
Although you could simply follow the narrative plot here this is a multi
layered novel one that slowly encompasses “the art of setting stones” and a miniature
view of a much broader landscape. We do have tea ceremonies, Buddhist
references, raked sand to represent various elements, holes in hedges to focus
your attention and more. All sub plots to the main story by our narrator, who is losing her memory but
revealing her story to us at the same time. A story which contains local
terrorists, tea growers, tribes who harvest bat nests (for soup), kamikaze pilots
and a mystery of hidden Japanese war wealth.
Despite my fears of a CT attack,
I enjoyed living on my own again, in these mountains where the breath of trees
turned to mists, where the mists entered the clouds and fell to earth again as
rain, where the rain was absorbed by the roots deep in the earth and drawn out
as vapour again by the leaves a hundred feet above the ground. The days here
opened from beyond one set of mountains and ended behind another, and I came to
think of Yugiri as a place lodged somewhere in a crease between daybreak and
sunset.
This is a beautifully styled novel and as I mentioned before
one that I allowed to slowly sink into my conscience. Judge Teoh’s life and the
journey through war camps, through varied relationships and her attachment to
Japanese gardens as well as woodblock prints and tattoo was not a journey I
could quickly skim through. Personally I could understand frustration at a
number of reader’s hands and if Japanese gardens, meditation and slow awareness
is not your think then this would probably infuriate you no end.
Overall a very enjoyable novel which taught me a great deal
about Japanese gardening, post war Malaya as well as narrative style. A worthy
inclusion to the Booker Shortlist and a serious competitor for the Man Asia
Literary Prize – the shorlist being:
Musharraf Ali Farooqi – Between Clay and Dust
Hiromi Kawakami – The Briefcase
Orhan Pamuk – Silent House
Tan Twan Eng – The Garden of Evening Mists
Jeet Thayil – Narcopolis
One of which I have reviewed here and the others will be
forthcoming (once I’ve received or read them).
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