The Garden of Evening Mists

The novel’s opening establishes its narrative structure as an act of reclamation in the face of progressive memory loss, linking the telling of the story to the theme of The Negotiation Between Memory and Forgetting. The frame narrative, in which an older Teoh Yun Ling writes her life story to combat the degenerative effects of aphasia, immediately positions memory not as a stable record but as a fragile territory under imminent threat of erasure. Her decision to write is a conscious attempt to impose literary order on the chaos of trauma and illness. This act parallels the art of gardening she learns from Aritomo, suggesting that both writing and garden-making are disciplined efforts to create order and meaning from unruly material. The narrative’s non-linear structure, which fluidly shifts between Yun Ling’s present in the late 1980s, her apprenticeship in the 1950s, and traumatic flashbacks to WWII, mirrors the fragmented nature of Yun Ling’s often-traumatic memories—less a chronological sequence than a series of recurring, intrusive fragments. Yun Ling’s professional identity as a judge, a purveyor of objective fact and reasoned judgment, is thus ironized; her own testimony is a subjective construction, a self-aware attempt to build a coherent self from the encroaching void.

The physical settings of Yugiri and the Majuba Tea Estate function as symbolic landscapes that externalize the novel’s central ideological and historical conflicts. Yugiri, the Garden of Evening Mists, represents a meticulously ordered sanctuary, a space where the Japanese aesthetic of control and harmony is wielded against the external violence of the Malayan Emergency and the internal chaos of memory. Like Yun Ling’s narrative, Yugiri embodies the function of Art as a Response to Chaos and Violence, serving as a vantage point from which the wider landscape of colonial Malaya is made contiguous with the inner landscapes of Aritomo and Yun Ling. In contrast, Majuba’s English-style gardens symbolize the colonial project of imposing a foreign order onto a tropical landscape. The tension between these two philosophies is articulated in the conflict between Yun Ling and Frederik Pretorius. His plan to create a garden reflecting the local environment represents a desire to return to a pre-colonial, “natural” state, but since this pre-colonial state exists only in the imagination of the colonizer, it is doomed to remain a colonial project. Meanwhile, Yun Ling defends the artifice of Yugiri, arguing that gardening is inherently about “the controlling and perfecting of nature” (14). This debate is both aesthetic and political, serving as a proxy for the broader struggles over Malayan identity, history, and the legacy of competing imperialisms—British and Japanese—that define the era. The introduction of shakkei (borrowed scenery) as a gardening principle further elevates this symbolism, functioning as a central metaphor for the construction of selfhood. Just as Aritomo incorporates the surrounding mountains into his garden’s design, the characters are shown to be products of their own borrowed landscapes of history, trauma, and culture.

These early chapters develop a complex web of character relationships that explore The Ambiguity of Justice and Reconciliation. The central relationship between Yun Ling, a survivor of a Japanese forced labor camp, and Nakamura Aritomo, the former gardener to the Japanese emperor, immediately establishes a profound ethical tension. Her quest is paradoxical: She seeks healing and remembrance from a representative of the very nation that caused her trauma. Magnus Pretorius is introduced as a foil to Yun Ling, and his personal history complicates the victim-perpetrator dichotomy between Aritomo and Yun Ling. His advice to Yun Ling to release her hatred is grounded in an experience of historical grievance separate from her own, which complicates the moral landscape and forces a confrontation with the universal mechanisms of imperial violence. The tense political arguments during the barbecue at Majuba further fragment any monolithic notion of Malayan identity, exposing the competing historical narratives and loyalties—Malay, Straits Chinese, British expatriate—that coexist uneasily in a nation struggling toward self-definition.

These opening chapters seed the motifs and symbols that will unify the novel’s disparate timelines and themes. The arrival of Professor Yoshikawa Tatsuji, with his theory that Aritomo was a secret horoshi, or tattoo artist, serves as significant foreshadowing, introducing the concept of the horimono that will later become a central symbol. The motif of concealment is powerfully established through Yun Ling’s gloves, which she wears constantly to hide the literal scars of her past—the two fingers amputated in the camp. They are a physical manifestation of her psychological armor, a barrier she maintains against the world. Aritomo’s insistence on discipline and direct contact with the natural world is positioned as a direct challenge to this self-protective barrier, foreshadowing the painful intimacy required for her apprenticeship. Furthermore, the recurring motif of maps and mapping is subtly introduced through the characters’ attempts to navigate the treacherous highland roads and the detailed descriptions of landscapes. This groundwork prepares for the later revelation of the horimono as a map, transforming Yun Ling’s body into a secret cartography of memory and history.