The Garden of Evening Mists

Yugiri, the titular Garden of Evening Mists, is the novel’s central symbol, representing a fragile attempt to impose order, beauty, and meaning on a world defined by violence and chaos. As a sanctuary meticulously crafted by the exiled Japanese gardener Aritomo, Yugiri functions as a space where art provides a response to the brutality of history. The garden’s very existence in the Malayan highlands, surrounded by the ongoing communist insurgency, highlights the tenuousness of this peace. Aritomo’s disciplined approach to gardening—shaping nature, framing views, and creating harmony—is a direct parallel to the novel’s broader theme of art as a necessary, deliberate act of defiance against a chaotic world. The garden is a physical manifestation of a desire for control and stillness in the wake of immense personal and historical trauma, offering a space for contemplation that is perpetually threatened by the world outside its walls.

The garden also serves as a complex repository of memory, a landscape where the past is both preserved and reconfigured. For Yun Ling, returning to Yugiri is what unlocks the story she must write down to fight her encroaching aphasia. For Aritomo, the garden is a memory of his lost homeland, painstakingly reconstructed in a foreign landscape. Its features are imbued with history, from the ancient Thai palace tiles to the waterwheel gifted by the emperor, reminding the characters that even a sanctuary cannot be fully divorced from a painful past. Aritomo tells Yun Ling, “An old house retains its hoard of memories” (1). In this sense, Yugiri is not an escape from memory but a place to confront and order it. The garden’s careful design, which conceals and reveals different vistas, mirrors the fragmented, selective nature of memory itself, underscoring how the past is never seen all at once but is pieced together through curated glimpses.