The Garden of Evening Mists

About “The Garden of Evening Mists”

On a mountain above the clouds in the central highlands of Malaya lived a man who had once been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan. Teoh Yun Ling, a seventeen-year-old girl, first heard of him years later, after a war and a decade had passed. In 1951, she traveled to the Garden of Evening Mists to see him. A survivor of a Japanese camp, she had spent years helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals. She asked the gardener, Nakamura Aritomo, to create a memorial garden for her sister, but he refused. He agreed to take her as his apprentice “until the monsoon” so she could design a garden herself. Yun Ling stayed at the home of Magnus Pretorius, the owner of Majuba Tea Estate and a veteran of the Boer War. She began working in the Garden of Evening Mists, but outside the garden, the Malayan Emergency was at its worst. Communist-terrorists were killing planters and their families, while Malayan nationalists fought for independence. The novel explores who Nakamura Aritomo is and how he came to be exiled from Japan. It also questions whether Yun Ling’s survival in the Japanese camp is connected to Aritomo and the garden. The story is told by Malaysian writer Tan Twan Eng, his second novel written in English.