The Garden of Evening Mists

“Walking over to the mound of leaves, I grabbed a few handfuls and scattered them randomly over the lawn. Brushing off the bits of leaves sticking to my hands, I stepped away from the grass. Yes, it looked better now. Much better.”

This brief, almost unconscious action reveals how deeply the aesthetic principles of Yugiri are ingrained in Yun Ling. In this moment of farewell to her ordered, structured life as a judge, she instinctively imposes a different kind of order on the courthouse garden, based not on neatness, but on the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi—the principle of finding beauty in transience and imperfection. The act foreshadows her need to return to Yugiri to restore its controlled wildness, mirroring her attempt to find meaning in the impending chaos of her memory loss.

“Outside, the mountains have been drawn into the garden, becoming a part of it. Aritomo was a master of shakkei, the art of Borrowed Scenery, taking elements and views from outside a garden and making them integral to his creation.”

The narration here explicitly defines the novel’s central motif, shakkei. This Japanese gardening principle serves as a metaphor for the narrative’s treatment of memory, suggesting that the past cannot be walled off but must be purposefully incorporated into the present landscape of one’s life. By framing the distant, unchangeable mountains as part of the immediate, cultivated garden, the author establishes a model for how Yun Ling must integrate her own vast and traumatic past into her present consciousness.

“‘The one on the right is Mnemosyne. You’ve heard of her?’ […] ‘Her twin sister, of course. The goddess of Forgetting.’ […] ‘Ah, doesn’t the fact of your not recalling prove her existence?’ He grinned. ‘Maybe she exists, but it’s just that we have forgotten.’”

This dialogue introduces a key symbol that directly confronts the theme of The Negotiation Between Memory and Forgetting. The invention of a goddess for forgetting, whose existence is paradoxically “proven” by the inability to remember her, encapsulates the novel’s complex view of memory as an act of both holding on and letting go.