The Garden of Evening Mists

As an ageing retired judge begins to lose language and memory, Teoh Yun Ling returns to Yugiri, the garden hidden in the Cameron Highlands, and records the years she has tried to leave unspoken. In 1951, still marked by imprisonment in a Japanese wartime camp and by the death of her sister Yun Hong, she sought out Nakamura Aritomo, once gardener to the Emperor of Japan. Yun Ling asked him to create a memorial garden; when he refused, she became his apprentice so that she might learn to build it herself.

Their work unfolds during the Malayan Emergency, while communist guerrillas, colonial security forces and memories of the Japanese occupation make the highlands dangerous and politically divided. Yun Ling’s anger towards Japan coexists uneasily with her attraction to Aritomo and with questions about his past, the camp and the tattoo he designs for her. Moving between war, insurgency and old age, the novel examines how art can preserve experience without resolving guilt, and how memory changes when survival depends upon both remembering and forgetting.