The Garden of Evening Mists

The narrative structure of these chapters deliberately juxtaposes two important confessions, creating a parallel between former enemies united by the enduring weight of wartime trauma. Tatsuji’s account in Chapter 16, detailing his experience as a kamikaze pilot, serves as a structural and thematic prelude to Yun Ling’s own testimony about the death of her sister and their fellow prisoners in Chapter 19. Both characters are sole survivors haunted by a profound sense of guilt—Tatsuji for living while his lover and comrades died, Yun Ling for escaping a camp where her sister and fellow prisoners perished. This pairing dismantles simplistic victim-perpetrator binaries, instead focusing on the shared human cost of conflict and the intensely personal nature of survival. Aritomo’s Zen koan (a very short story, similar to a parable, the purpose of which is to shift the listener’s perspective) about the flag in the wind acts as a philosophical framework for these confessions, suggesting that the true source of turmoil is not the external world, but one’s own mind. The novel posits that the true landscape of war is internal, and the act of giving voice to these tormented memories, of charting this internal terrain for another, is a necessary, albeit painful, step toward confronting the past. The placement of Yun Ling’s story within a flashback, nested inside the larger flashback of her apprenticeship, structurally mirrors the deep burial of her trauma, emphasizing the immense psychological effort required to excavate and articulate it.

These chapters bring the central theme of Art as a Response to Chaos and Violence to its most intimate expression through the proposal of the horimono. The raw, visceral horror of Yun Ling’s camp experience, recounted in detail in Chapter 19, finds its antithesis in Aritomo’s proposition at the end of Chapter 20. The chaos of the camp—characterized by arbitrary violence, starvation, and degradation—is set against the highly controlled, ritualized, and meaningful practice of traditional Japanese tattooing. The process of tattooing is painful, but unlike the pain inflicted on Yun Ling in the camp, this is a pain she has freely chosen. In this way, the tattoo mirrors the arduous labor of building Yugiri. In Chapter 7, as Yun Ling begins the work of hauling large stones for the garden, she is reminded of the trauma she experienced at the labor camp, but she reminds herself that context matters: This labor is a choice. Similarly, the tattoo is a chosen pain, and just as the garden imposes order on the natural landscape, the tattoo imposes beauty, order, and knowledge on the landscape of inchoate violence that is Yun Ling’s scarred back. Aritomo’s intention to encode the principles of garden design onto her skin, to create “an extension of Sakuteiki” (274), signifies an attempt to impose the harmony and balance of a meticulously planned garden onto the disordered landscape of her memory. The choice of a horimono, an art form that is both painful and permanent, acknowledges the inescapable nature of her past while simultaneously offering a way to re-contextualize it. It suggests that while trauma cannot be erased, it can be integrated into a new, more resilient identity.

The novel further complicates its exploration of wartime legacies by presenting nuanced and subversive portrayals of its principal Japanese male characters, defying the monolithic archetype of the enemy. Tatsuji is not a fanatic but a man torn between duty and love, his survival a source of lifelong shame rather than relief. Tominaga Noburu, the prison guard who helps Yun Ling escape, is a morally ambiguous figure whose actions are driven by a complex mix of aesthetic obsession, professional rivalry, and a hidden gay identity that allows him to see Yun Ling outside the designated role of a female conquest. His orchestration of her escape does not absolve him of his war crimes, but it grants Yun Ling another chance at life, including the time she will need to make sense of her experiences. Even Aritomo, the master artist, is revealed to have a past entangled with imperial politics and personal rivalries. His pained reaction to the news of Tominaga’s death by suicide, together with his subsequent desire to have prayers said for his spirit, reveals a shared history that transcends their opposition. Through these characters, the novel engages with The Ambiguity of Justice and Reconciliation on an individual rather than a national level, demonstrating that history is populated not by clear-cut heroes and villains, but by individuals navigating complex loyalties and moral compromises.

The relationship between the body, memory, and landscape crystallizes in this section, establishing the body itself as the ultimate repository of history. Yun Ling’s mutilated hand serves as a constant, visible reminder of her punishment and loss, a physical manifestation of her trauma that she habitually conceals with gloves. The scars on her back, though hidden, are a more extensive record of the beatings she endured. These physical markings have no meaning other than violence, and the horimono transforms her scarred skin into a repository of personal history, hidden knowledge, and artistic philosophy. The proposed design of the tattoo, which would fade into the surrounding skin without a hard border, serves as a powerful metaphor for the novel’s treatment of memory. Just as the tattoo would have no clear boundary, her past is not a discrete, contained event but something that permeates every aspect of her present. The horimono literalizes the idea that memory is inscribed upon the self, making the body a landscape to be charted and, through art, reclaimed.

The physical settings of these chapters function as crucial psychological spaces that enable the narrative’s deepest revelations. The journey to the remote Temple of Clouds is a pilgrimage into a liminal space, far removed from the ordinary world, where the boundaries between past and present can dissolve. The temple’s isolation and serene atmosphere create the conditions necessary for Yun Ling to finally break her decades of silence. Similarly, the arrival of the monsoon at Yugiri serves a vital narrative purpose. The relentless rain physically isolates the garden, cutting it off from the outside world and intensifying the focus on the internal lives of Yun Ling and Aritomo. This imposed enclosure mirrors Yun Ling’s psychological state, trapped within her memories, but it also creates a sanctuary where the intimate and transformative process of the horimono can begin. The external world, whether it is the violence of the Communist insurgency or the intrusion of the Japanese delegation, is temporarily held at bay by the weather, allowing the novel to delve into the more profound and lasting conflicts within its characters’ minds.