The Garden of Evening Mists

These chapters establish a foundational juxtaposition between the creation of aesthetic order and the intrusion of historical violence, directly engaging with the theme of Art as a Response to Chaos and Violence. Yun Ling’s decision to begin her apprenticeship at Yugiri is precipitated by a brutal attack on an Indigenous family. This act of violence, which hardens Yun Ling’s resolve to build a memorial to her sister, positions the garden’s creation as a necessary, deliberate countermeasure to the anarchic violence that surrounds her. The garden, Yugiri, thus becomes more than a personal memorial; it is a physical manifestation of the act of cultivating memory. As Yun Ling and Aritomo build the space together, they incorporate their memories, imposing a meticulous aesthetic and moral philosophy on both the natural world and the inner landscape of the self. This dynamic is reinforced by the constant presence of external threats: Security fences are erected at Majuba, Inspector Woo warns Yun Ling that she is a target, and Aritomo’s own disciplined violence in disarming a fired worker demonstrates that the principles of control and form, central to art, can also be a defense against physical aggression. The garden is not an escape from reality, but a highly controlled, fragile ordering of it.

The apprenticeship under Aritomo functions as a complex process of psychological and physical reconstruction for Yun Ling. Aritomo’s pedagogy is purposefully severe, designed to strip away her defenses and force a direct confrontation with both the physical world and her own trauma. His command for her to remove her gloves is a pivotal moment, compelling her to expose her injured hand—the physical evidence of her past suffering—and to feel the soil directly, grounding her in the present moment. This act repudiates the emotional self-isolation she has maintained since the war. The labor itself is a form of discipline that reclaims her body from the memory of forced, dehumanizing work in the forced labor camp. Aritomo’s instruction to “obey the request of the stone” (89) reframes the entire endeavor: Rather than imposing her will upon nature, she is learning to perceive and collaborate with an inherent order. This philosophy recasts her garden from a monument to grief into an exercise in achieving harmony, suggesting that healing comes not from burying the past, but from learning to place it with care and intention within the landscape of the present.

The introduction of the present-day narrative frame in Chapter 9 marks a significant structural shift, recontextualizing the entire preceding story as an act of memory under threat. By revealing the elderly Yun Ling’s diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia, the novel foregrounds The Negotiation Between Memory and Forgetting as its central thematic concern. The act of writing her story becomes a desperate race against the erasure of memory, lending an urgent, tragic weight to the detailed recollections of her past. This frame narrative enacts a complex exploration of how identity is constructed and deconstructed through language and memory. Frederik’s recitation of the Norse myth of Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life whose roots are being devoured, serves as a potent metaphor for Yun Ling’s condition. The tree is “doomed from the moment it is planted” (118), mirroring the inexorable progression of her illness. The novel’s structure, which now oscillates between a remembered past and a deteriorating present, mirrors the fractured nature of Yun Ling’s own consciousness, forcing the reader to question the reliability of a narrative being actively salvaged from oblivion.

The principle shakkei, or “borrowed scenery,” serves as a motif symbolizing the intentional construction of life and narrative. Aritomo explains shakkei as the art of incorporating the surrounding landscape into a garden’s design, creating a seamless continuity between the artificial and the natural. This concept becomes a metaphor for how individuals integrate their pasts, their surroundings, and even the stories of others into a cohesive present. At the Mid-Autumn Festival, Aritomo’s ritualistic burning of his own paper lanterns exemplifies a related Zen Buddhist principle: the appreciation of transient beauty and non-attachment. By creating art only to destroy it, he privileges the act of creation and the present moment over permanence and possession. His parting words to Yun Ling, in which he states that he will “borrow moonlight for this journey of a million miles” (134), applies the concept of shakkei to life itself, suggesting that one can draw upon the elements of the world—memories, light, stories—to navigate an interior journey.

These chapters systematically introduce layers of secrecy and hidden histories that complicate character relationships and foreshadow the novel’s central mysteries. The revelation that Aritomo is a master of horimono and that Magnus Pretorius possessed a large tattoo hints at a shared, clandestine past connected to the Japanese occupation. This network of secrets suggests that the war’s legacy is inscribed physically and covertly onto the bodies of its participants. Tatsuji’s arrival as a historian seeking Aritomo’s art functions as a catalyst, beginning the process of excavating these hidden narratives. His academic pursuit of knowledge stands in stark contrast to Yun Ling’s deeply personal and traumatic embodiment of that same history. This tension explores The Ambiguity of Justice and Reconciliation, suggesting that the full truth of the past cannot be found in archives because its fragments are scattered in buried secrets, scarred skin, and landscapes that hold more than they reveal. The cryptic meeting Yun Ling observes between Aritomo and an unknown man in the jungle further develops this sense of a submerged history, positioning the serene garden of Yugiri at the center of a web of wartime intrigue.