The Garden of Evening Mists

In the novel’s concluding chapters, the horimono is fully realized as the narrative’s most potent and complex symbol, a site where the central themes of memory, art, and justice converge and are permanently inscribed upon Yun Ling’s body. The process of its creation physically enacts the theme of Art as a Response to Chaos and Violence. Yun Ling finds that the physical pain of the needles paradoxically deadens the clamor in her mind, illustrating art’s function as a structuring discipline against internal chaos. The tattoo does more than cover the scars of her torture; it subsumes them into an intricate, meaningful design, turning a landscape of trauma into a work of art. The horimono becomes the ultimate embodiment of The Negotiation Between Memory and Forgetting. It is a permanent, physical archive of a past she cannot escape, one that will leave the world only when she does. Her choice not to preserve the tattoo after her death suggests a kinship with the sketches that Aritomo creates in the gravel of the garden and then erases each day. Through her relationship with Aritomo, Yun Ling has come to recognize that nothing is permanent, and that her task is to make beauty and meaning from her experience before it is inevitably wiped away. The final revelation that this intensely personal artwork is also a map to a Golden Lily treasure site recasts her entire story. Her body is no longer just a record of her own life but a chart of a vast, imperial crime, linking her private suffering to a history of national plunder. Yun Ling’s ultimate decision to have the horimono destroyed after her death is her final act of agency, a refusal to let her body—and her memory—be exploited for its material secrets, asserting the primacy of personal peace over public reckoning.

The narrative structure in this final section mirrors Yun Ling’s struggle with aphasia and the fractured nature of recollection. By interweaving the climax of the 1950s timeline—the communist attack, Magnus’s death, and Aritomo’s disappearance—with the present-day revelations about Golden Lily, the novel collapses the distinction between past and present. This forces the reader to experience memory as Yun Ling does: not as a linear sequence, but as a dynamic and unstable landscape where new information constantly reconfigures the meaning of past events. This narrative method reflects the nature of memory itself as a landscape that shifts as new information emerges. The completion of her written memoir in the final chapter brings this parallel to a close. The act of writing is portrayed as analogous to garden-making: a deliberate ordering of chaotic material to create a space of meaning and coherence before it is lost forever.

These final chapters also advance a critique of conventional justice, ultimately rejecting legal and historical resolution in favor of a more personal and ambiguous form of peace. The theme of The Ambiguity of Justice and Reconciliation culminates in Yun Ling’s decision to abandon the map on her back. Discovering the probable location of her sister’s remains and the site of a war crime offers a path to a conventional form of closure, yet she chooses to let the past lie buried. This choice marks her final disillusionment with the frameworks of institutional justice she once served at the War Crimes Tribunal. The novel posits that true reconciliation cannot be achieved through external processes of judgment or retribution. Instead, it is an internal state, reached by holding contradictory truths in a fragile balance. This is powerfully symbolized by her plan to open Yugiri as a memorial to both Yun Hong, a victim of Japanese imperialism, and Aritomo, the Japanese man who created the garden and may have been complicit in the systems that killed her. By honoring them in the same space, Yun Ling creates a personal reconciliation that transcends the rigid dichotomies of victim and perpetrator.

The interconnected motifs of mapping and shakkei (borrowed scenery) provide a philosophical framework for understanding Yun Ling’s ultimate path to resolution. Throughout the novel, maps represent a desire for certainty—a rational, empirical way to chart the treacherous terrain of history and memory. The revelation that the horimono is a literal map is the ultimate expression of this impulse, reducing her lived experience to a set of coordinates pointing to a hidden truth. However, Yun Ling’s final decisions align more closely with the aesthetic and philosophical principles of shakkei. Instead of using the map to excavate the past, she embraces the art of borrowing. She “borrows” the garden Aritomo created and repurposes it as a memorial for her sister, integrating his legacy into her own narrative of remembrance. This act mirrors the gardening principle of incorporating distant landscapes into a garden’s composition to create a new, harmonious whole. Yun Ling escapes a life caught between fixed duties and an unchartable present by shifting her perspective from the logic of the mapmaker to the vision of the gardener. She stops trying to pinpoint the past and instead learns to compose a meaningful present out of all she has inherited.

Finally, the novel concludes by affirming the power of disciplined artistic practice as a means of achieving inner stillness in a world of chaos. The parallel arts of kyudo and horimono are presented not merely as aesthetic pursuits but as embodied philosophies. Yun Ling internalizes this lesson through her own practice. Her climactic kyudo scene, in which a temporary blindness forces her to rely entirely on muscle memory and mental focus, serves as a metaphor for her journey. Deprived of sight—of evidence and empirical knowledge—she successfully completes the shot by drawing on the knowledge she has internalized over countless hours of practice. This act symbolizes her newfound ability to navigate the encroaching darkness of her aphasia and the unresolvable ambiguities of her past. She learns to trust the internal form she has cultivated rather than relying on external orientation. Her recurring dream of shooting Aritomo with an invisible arrow is not an act of revenge but a final, psychic release—an acknowledgment of his profound impact and a quiet severance. In the end, the achieves through the same rigorous principles of art that Aritomo used to build his garden and etch his story onto her skin.