The Garden of Evening Mists

The Garden of Evening Mists is set against the backdrop of two violent conflicts that shaped modern Malaysia: the Japanese occupation (1941-1945) and the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960). The occupation was marked by extreme brutality, including the systematic torture and murder of civilians and the sexual enslavement of “comfort women” (jugan ianfu), an experience Yun Ling’s sister endures. The Malayan Emergency was a protracted guerrilla war fought between British Commonwealth forces and the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), the armed wing of the Malayan Communist Party. Like the Japanese occupiers, the British resorted to brutal and illegal tactics to suppress the MNLA, including the world’s first use of herbicides as a weapon of war, as British forces sprayed Agent Orange from airplanes to deprive MNLA fighters of food and cover—a tactic that the United States would soon adopt in Vietnam. Though the MNLA never comprised more than about 8,000 fighters, British occupiers forcibly relocated approximately 1 million civilians—targeted for their ethnicity rather than for any actual involvement in the conflict—into “New Villages” that were effectively concentration camps in an attempt to deprive the MNLA of support. This policy is referenced in the novel.

The conflict’s unusual name began as a British euphemism: The British government wanted to avoid referring to the conflict as a war because insurance agencies in London would not pay claims arising from civil wars in the colonies. Though this is the term used in the source text, some scholars refer to the conflict instead as the Anti-British National Liberation War. This conflict created a climate of pervasive fear, with tactics like targeted assassinations and the forced resettlement of over half a million civilians into fortified “New Villages.” This strategy, known as the Briggs Plan, is referenced in the novel. These two historical traumas create a landscape of fractured identities and unresolved grief, both for the nation and for the characters.

The novel’s epigraph, from Richard Holmes’s A Meander Through Memory and Forgetting, posits memory and forgetting as “twin sisters,” establishing the central philosophical conflict born from this history. For Yun Ling, a survivor of a secret Japanese labor camp, the past is not a distant memory but a visceral, ongoing presence. Her decision to take early retirement is precipitated by aphasia, a condition that threatens to erase her memories before she can make sense of them. Her urgent need to “write it all down” (22) is a direct response to her historical trauma and her fear of losing her own story. The novel uses this deeply personal struggle to explore how individuals and nations grapple with violent histories. It questions whether healing comes from confronting the past, as seen in the War Crimes Tribunals, or from the grace of letting go, a peace that remains elusive for Yun Ling throughout her journey.

Cultural Context: Japanese Aesthetics and the Art of Impermanence

The novel is deeply informed by Japanese aesthetic principles, which offer a way to create order and find meaning in a world of suffering. This philosophy is most evident in the design of Yugiri, Aritomo’s garden, but it also extends to the highly disciplined arts of archery (kyudo) and tattooing (horimono). Central to Aritomo’s craft is the concept of shakkei, or “borrowed scenery.” This technique involves incorporating views from outside a garden’s borders, making them part of the composition. For example, the gardens of the Shugaku-in Imperial Villa in Kyoto famously borrow the view of the surrounding mountains. In the novel, Aritomo is a master of shakkei, designing Yugiri to borrow the mountains, mists, and “ever-changing light” (27) of the Cameron Highlands, thereby dissolving the boundary between the cultivated garden and the wild landscape. This aesthetic act of integration reflects the characters’ attempts to reconcile their inner worlds with the chaotic external one.

The garden also embodies the principle of mono no aware, an awareness of the transience of all things. This concept is central to Japanese cultural practices like hanami, or cherry blossom viewing, where the beauty of the blossoms is heightened by their brief lifespan. The novel articulates this as appreciating “that point in time just as the last leaf is about to drop […] [which] captures everything beautiful and sorrowful about life” (163). Through these aesthetic frameworks, the characters learn to find a fragile sense of peace not by denying impermanence and loss, but by cultivating a deep, sorrowful appreciation for them.