The Garden of Evening Mists

Nakamura Aritomo is the enigmatic deuteragonist of the novel, a master gardener and mentor figure whose quiet presence belies a mysterious and complex past. As the former gardener to the Emperor of Japan, he is a round character who embodies the disciplined pursuit of beauty in a chaotic world. While his core principles remain constant, his relationship with Yun Ling reveals deeper layers of his personality and history.

Aritomo’s most apparent trait is his profound discipline and aesthetic austerity. His entire existence is dedicated to creating order and harmony, whether through the meticulous design of his garden, Yugiri, or the controlled mental stillness he achieves through kyudo, the art of archery. Yugiri itself stands as a symbol of this effort, a carefully constructed sanctuary designed to look ancient and timeless, providing a fragile shield against the violence of the Malayan Emergency raging outside its walls. He understands that words are insufficient to heal Yun Ling’s trauma, and he does not apologize on behalf of his country—a choice Yun Ling appreciates: “What words could have healed my pain, returned my sister to me? None. And he understood that” (1). Instead, he offers her a path toward healing through the disciplined practice of art, believing that the act of creating beauty is a more potent response to suffering than any apology.

Beneath his placid exterior, Aritomo is a deeply private man. He rarely speaks of his reasons for leaving his prestigious post in Japan or the life he left behind. This secrecy makes him a figure of intense speculation. The slow revelation of his past, including his feud with Tominaga Noburu, his role as a horimono (tattoo) artist, and his possible connection to the clandestine wartime operation Golden Lily, forms one of the novel’s central mysteries. His use of shakkei (borrowed scenery) in his gardens serves as a metaphor for his character; he integrates the world outside into his creation without ever fully revealing his own hand, leaving others to guess at his intentions and history. This mysterious nature forces Yun Ling, and the reader, to constantly re-evaluate his motives and his role in the larger historical narrative.

Despite his reserve, Aritomo is capable of great, albeit unconventional, compassion. He perceives Yun Ling’s deep-seated pain and recognizes that a simple garden commission would be a superficial solution. By taking her on as an apprentice, he gives her the tools to confront her own grief and find her own sense of order. His ultimate artistic act is creating the horimono on Yun Ling’s back, a deeply intimate and painful process that transforms her scars into a secret, beautiful map of her past. This act is not one of erasure but of integration, turning her trauma into a part of her identity that is both artful and meaningful. Through these actions, Aritomo reveals himself to be a perceptive and profound mentor, guiding Yun Ling toward a form of peace that transcends simple notions of forgiveness or forgetting.

A South African Boer farmer and the owner of Majuba Tea Estate, Magnus Pretorius functions as a key mentor and the catalyst for the novel’s central relationship. He is a round, static character whose history of trauma provides him with a unique capacity for empathy. Having been a prisoner in a British concentration camp during the Boer War, he understands the lasting bitterness of imperial conflict and the difficulty of overcoming hatred. This personal history allows him to connect with Yun Ling and gently guide her toward a path of potential healing.

Magnus’s defining characteristic is his blend of gruff pragmatism and deep-seated compassion. Outwardly, he is a colonial planter, concerned with the running of his estate and the security threats of the Emergency (a British euphemism for civil war). Inwardly, however, he carries the weight of his own violent past. He uses his story to offer Yun Ling a crucial lesson in survival, not of the body, but of the spirit. He tells her that holding onto hatred is a self-destructive act, admitting that if he had clung to his anger toward the British, “that would have killed me” (42). This shared experience of suffering allows him to speak to Yun Ling with an authority that others lack. It is his suggestion that she build a garden for her sister, and his introduction to Aritomo, that sets the entire narrative in motion. His home, a Cape Dutch house filled with African art, also serves as a symbolic contrast to Yugiri, representing a different attempt to build a sanctuary by transplanting a distant home into a new land.

As Magnus Pretorius’s nephew and heir to the Majuba Tea Estate, Frederik is a round, static character who serves as a loyal friend to Yun Ling and a subtle foil to Aritomo. Having fought for the British in Burma during World War II, he has his own experience with the horrors of war but approaches life and nature with a sensibility different from Aritomo’s. His steadfast friendship provides Yun Ling with a grounding, conventional form of support throughout her life.

Frederik’s worldview is practical and direct, which often puts him in contrast with Aritomo’s more philosophical perspective. This is most evident in his approach to gardening. He hires a landscape artist to create an “Indigenous garden” at Majuba, wanting to let plants grow “with as little human assistance—or interference—as possible” (14). This preference for wild, untamed nature is the antithesis of Aritomo’s highly controlled, artificial, and meticulously planned aesthetic at Yugiri, a place Frederik finds deceptive. His romantic feelings for Yun Ling, which she never fully reciprocates, further highlight his role as a representative of a more straightforward path she chooses not to take. In the present-day narrative, he is Yun Ling’s primary listener and her last living connection to her time at Yugiri, prompting her to confront her memories and providing the compassionate audience she needs.

A Japanese historian and expert on woodblock prints, Yoshikawa Tatsuji is a round, static character who acts as the catalyst for the novel’s framing narrative. His arrival at Yugiri in the present day compels the aging Yun Ling to record her story before her encroaching aphasia makes this task impossible. Tatsuji carries the weight of his own wartime past as a kamikaze pilot whose friend and lover died in his place. His life since the war has been a quiet, scholarly penance, dedicated to documenting the complexities of Japanese art and history, including his country’s war crimes.

Tatsuji’s role is to unearth the past, both for his academic work and for Yun Ling herself. His research reveals that Aritomo was secretly a horimono artist and introduces the possibility of Aritomo’s involvement in the Golden Lily operation. His confession of having participated brutal abuse of escaped prisoners of war add another layer of complexity to the theme of the ambiguity of justice and reconciliation. He does not seek forgiveness but rather understanding, embodying the difficult, personal journey of atonement that occurs long after the official end of a war.

Magnus’s Chinese wife, Emily Pretorius, is a flat character who provides insight into the social fabric of colonial Malaya. She is a practical and resilient figure who runs the estate clinic and manages the household with quiet authority. Though not from a family as prominent as Yun Ling’s, she navigates the complexities of her marriage to someone of a different race and colonial society with a blend of traditional Chinese propriety and pragmatic adaptation. In her later years, her struggle with dementia and the fragmentation of her memory serves to foreshadow the progression of Yun Ling’s own degenerative illness, highlighting the novel’s exploration of The Negotiation Between Memory and Forgetting. Her steadfast love for Magnus and her maintenance of his memory through his nightly piano concertos underscores the novel’s focus on personal acts of remembrance.

Although she is deceased and appears only in flashbacks and memory, Teoh Yun Hong is a pivotal figure whose presence motivates much of the novel’s action. Her sister Yun Ling remembers her as a gentle and artistic soul whose dream was to create a Japanese garden. As a flat, static character, she represents an idealized innocence that was brutally destroyed by the war. Her fate as a jugan ianfu, or “comfort woman,” in the labor camp is the source of Yun Ling’s deepest trauma and survivor’s guilt. Yun Ling’s quest to build a garden in her name is an attempt to preserve the memory of her sister’s dream and atone for being unable to save her. Yun Hong is the ghost at the heart of the narrative, a symbol of all that was lost to the violence of history.