The Garden of Evening Mists

In The Garden of Evening Mists, memory is not a perfect record of the past but a fractured, burdensome, and deeply personal landscape that shapes both personal and collective identities. Protagonist Teoh Yun Ling’s struggle with her traumatic past and encroaching aphasia suggests that while memories can imprison, the act of ordering and recounting them is a vital, if imperfect, way to reclaim one’s story. The novel’s non-linear structure mirrors this internal state, shifting between Yun Ling’s present and her fragmented past, forcing the reader to piece together her history as she races to write it down.

All the novel’s characters have been impacted in varying ways by colonial violence, and for each of them, memory is a source of pain and an obstacle to peace. Yun Ling is haunted by her time in a Japanese forced labor camp, and these traumatic recollections manifest as a profound survivor’s guilt that isolates her from others. The novel’s structure, jumping between different periods of Yun Ling’s life without clear chronological progression, mirrors her fractured psychological state. This disjointed timeline reflects the intrusive and chaotic nature of her memories. Her decision to write her story is prompted by a diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia, a degenerative condition that will ultimately erase her ability to understand and use language. This looming loss of memory and language creates a powerful sense of urgency, framing the act of remembrance not as a gentle reflection but as a desperate battle against oblivion.

However, the novel also proposes that memory, while burdensome, can be a tool for shaping the present. This idea is powerfully illustrated through the Japanese concept of shakkei, or borrowed scenery, which Aritomo explains is the practice of incorporating outside elements, like a distant mountain, into a garden’s design. This serves as a metaphor for how Yun Ling must learn to integrate her painful memories into the landscape of her life rather than trying to erase them. The novel reinforces this theme by referencing the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, and invoking her imagined twin, the goddess of forgetting. This contrast suggests that forgetting is as important to the work of building and maintaining the self as memory is. Yun Ling’s manuscript, the very text of the novel, becomes her ultimate attempt to create order from chaos, borrowing the scenery of her past to construct a coherent self in the present. This effort—analogous to her work in the garden—depends on conscious efforts to cultivate (remember) and prune (forget) her experience of the past. Just as memory is always subjective, incomplete, and contentious, forgetting is neither absolute nor irrevocable. For Yun Ling, it means moving traumatic events from the foreground into the background, so that they become the “borrowed scenery” that frames the cultivated garden of the self. The novel argues that nations undergo a similar negotiation between memory and forgetting, choosing what to carry forward and what to leave behind. In her work on the war crimes tribunals, for instance, Yun Ling is fired for demanding that Japan remember what it seems determined to forget. Through this process, Eng suggests that while memory is flawed and painful, the act of shaping it into a narrative is a necessary, redemptive human endeavor.