Literature / The Gift of Rain

The Gift of Rain is a 2007 historical novel, the debut of Tan Twan Eng. It's set in Malaya (now Malaysia) before, during, and after Imperial Japan invaded in 1941.

The book starts in 1939. Philip Hutton, the half-Chinese son of an English merchant, befriends Hayato Endo, the newly-arrived Japanese diplomat. Then Japan invades Malaya, and Philip realises that through his friendship with Hayato, he's unwittingly become a traitor. He tries to play both sides by assisting the Japanese while passing information to the British, with disastrous results for his family.

Contains examples of:

• Age-Gap Romance:
  • Michiko says that Hayato was "very much older" than her, and she is presumably in her late teens or early twenties when they first met. She's about the same age as Philip, meaning Hayato was probably around thirty years older than her.
  • Yu Lian was seventeen and Noel was thirty-two when they met.
  • Isabel is in her early twenties when she falls in love with forty-seven-year-old Peter.
  • Calling it a "romance" is dubious, for several reasons, but Philip is sixteen and Hayato is in his late forties when they meet.
• Ambiguously Bi: Hayato had a romantic relationship with Michiko before he left Japan, and his relationship with Philip certainly has hints of being... less than teacherly. At one point he tells Philip that he loves him, and has loved him in their previous lifetimes. It's left up to the reader to decide if he's sincere or manipulating Philip. He seems to be sincere towards the end of his life, if only because he has nothing left to lose.
• Ambiguously Gay: Philip never marries or shows any interest in women, and his relationship with Hayato reads exactly like a teenager with a crush. He outright states he loves Hayato and leaves it very ambiguous if he means platonically or romantically. On the other hand, he only refers to Hayato as his teacher or his friend, never as his lover. He also never shows interest in other men (except Saotome, and that's explicitly because Saotome reminds him of Hayato — and that attraction ends the minute Saotome reveals his true colours), leaving it unclear if he's gay or asexual (possibly with a case of Single-Target Sexuality for Hayato).
• Artistic License – History: The author's note at the end explains some of the deliberate inaccuracies.
  • There was no ceremony when Penang surrendered to the Imperial Japanese Army. The book's ceremony is based on the surrender of Singapore.
  • Wen Zu never existed, and the second attempt at reforming the Qing dynasty is fictional.
• Bittersweet Ending: Leaning much more towards bitter than sweet. Philip's entire family, Kon, and many other innocent people are dead. Philip helps Hayato commit suicide. He lives alone for years until he meets Michiko, then she dies too. Many people still consider Philip a war criminal who escaped justice. The only thing keeping it from being a complete Downer Ending is that Philip is resigned to his fate and has managed to make a fairly good life for himself in spite of all the tragedies.
• Blood from the Mouth: Michiko coughs up blood. This is how Philip finds out about her cancer.
• Boomerang Bigot: Khoo Wu An, who disowns his daughter for her marriage and refuses to see his mixed grandson, is himself the result of a mixed marriage between a Han Chinese woman and a Manchu man. He says his mother must have loved his father very much to marry him in spite of how much her family hated the Manchus, and is apparently oblivious to the irony.
• Brutal Honesty:
  Philip: Will Japan invade Malaya?
  Hayato: Yes.
• Character Overlap: The Hutton family are mentioned in passing in Tan's second novel The Garden of Evening Mists.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: The antagonists are Imperial Japan during World War II. The horrors Philip witnesses — including using prisoners for bayonet practice — aren't even as bad as the things they did in real life.
• Completely Unnecessary Translator: Philip is hired as the Japanese government's translator, and his first official appearance is at the surrender of Malaya. He observes that there's no need for his presence there; all three high-ranking Japanese officials there are fluent in English. They bring Philip along to make sure everyone knows he's working for them.
• Conflicting Loyalty: When Philip becomes Hayato's assistant, he's torn between his loyalty to his teacher and his loyalty to his homeland.
• Death by Childbirth: Emma Hutton died giving birth to Isabel.
• Depraved Bisexual: Saotome rapes a teenage girl and tries to convince Philip to sleep with him in exchange for information.
• Dig Your Own Grave: The Japanese soldiers round up villagers, drive them into the jungle, hand them shovels and tell them to start digging, then open fire on them.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  There was so much anger and so much fear, they fuelled our movements and our release. He attacked me again and again, pressing into me, sinking into me with such intensity, as though he wanted to imprint a part of him in me, to leave a portion of his soul in mine.

They're fighting, but good luck deducing that from this excerpt. (The full paragraph makes it slightly clearer, since Philip specifically mentions Hayato is using his katana and Philip parries his attacks with his own sword, but it still sounds like a description of something completely different.)

• Driven to Suicide:
  • Wen Zu would have been murdered on Ci Xi's orders after Guangxu's death. He chose to cut his own throat rather than wait for the assassins.
  • Ming kills herself after her husband is murdered and she's raped.
  • Tanaka is too badly injured to escape, so he asks Kon to help him kill himself. Kon does.
  • Hiroshi and other Japanese officers commit suicide after Japan's surrender.
• Embarrassing Middle Name: Philip's middle name is Arminius, chosen by his mother as a reference to either Armenian Street (where her father lived) or Jacobus Arminius. Philip never uses his middle name and jokes that he's one of the few people named after a road instead of the other way round.
• Epigraph: The book starts with a quotation from Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell & the Butterfly: "I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches his home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory."
• Eye Scream: According to legend, Bodhidharmo cut off his eyelids so he would stop falling asleep while meditating. Wen Zu does the same right before his suicide.
• False Friend: Hayato was sent to Malaya as a spy, taking photos of the geography and learning more about the country's defences. He befriended Philip because Philip was lonely and naïve enough to take him around Malaya and answer his questions without suspecting anything until it was too late.
• Fake Assisted Suicide: Subverted. Fujihara asks Philip to help him commit seppuku. Philip plays along until they're alone. Then he reveals he's brought some of Fujihara's victims or their relatives with him. He won't kill Fujihara, but he won't stop them doing it.
• Framing Device / How We Got Here: The first chapter is set years after the war, when Michiko visits a now-elderly Philip and asks to see Hayato's grave. The rest of the book is a flashback with occasional returns to the present.
• Friendless Background: Philip, because of being mixed-race. Hayato is the first friend he makes. This is possibly why Hayato picks him; Philip's loneliness makes him a perfect target for emotional manipulation.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: In addition to English, the book contains some Japanese, Cantonese, Hokkien, Malay, and German.
• Half-Breed Discrimination: Philip gets it from both the Chinese and English communities.
• Historical Character's Fictional Relative: Wen Zu, who was a distant cousin of the Guangxu Emperor.
• Historical Domain Character: Various real people are mentioned, including Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, General Yamashita Tomoyuki, General Arthur Percival, Sir Francis Light, the Guangxu Emperor (spelled "Kuang Hsu" in the book), Dowager Empress Ci Xi (spelled "Tzu Xsi"), and Puyi.
• Jerkass Has a Point: The fortune-teller refuses to read Hayato's future because he's Japanese, and she warns Philip to beware of him. Philip assumes her warning is just because she hates Japanese people. Then the Japanese army invades, and he realises he should have been more wary of Hayato.
• Last-Name Basis: Philip always calls Hayato "Endo-san".
• Love Triangle: Tanaka loves Michiko, who loves Hayato. Becomes a complicated sort of Love Square if you include Philip, who also loves Hayato.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: Noel (English) marries Yu Lian (Chinese). Yu Lian's father is so angry with her that he removes all of her belongings from his house, refuses to attend her funeral, and won't even see her son. He meets his grandson for the first time when Philip is sixteen, and even then it's implied his other daughter Yu Mei forced him to agree to the meeting.
• Manipulative Bastard: Hayato, towards Philip.
• Mercy Kill: Isabel is caught passing information to the British. If she's brought into Japanese custody she'll suffer a Fate Worse than Death, so Hayato tells her to make a run for it. She does, and he shoots her.
• Missing Mum: Noel Hutton is a widower twice over, so this applies to his children with both wives.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero / Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: A fortune-teller warns Wu An that if Yu Lian marries Noel, she'll have a son who will betray and ruin both the Khoo and Hutton families. Yu Lian marries Noel anyway, so Wu An disowns her. This leads to her son Philip growing up cut off from his mother's family and feeling rejected, which makes him more willing to befriend Hayato, which leads directly to the betrayal and ruin Wu An wanted to avoid.
• "Not So Different" Remark: An especially chilling one, because Saotome compares himself to Hayato right after trying to blackmail Philip into sex.
  Saotome: I do not know why you refuse. You think Endo-san is different from me? That just because he is your sensei he will watch over you and protect you? He and I are more similar than you are aware of. He is myself not so long ago; he will become what I am.
• Off with His Head!:
  • The punishment for the looters, followed by Decapitation Presentation.
  • Nearly happens to Philip when he's found guilty of treason. His father takes his place.
  • If Philip's dream is really a flashback to a previous life, Hayato's previous incarnation beheaded his previous incarnation. And in this lifetime, Philip beheads Hayato.
• Outliving One's Offspring:
  • Wu An outlives his son, who dies in infancy, and his daughter Yu Lian, who dies of malaria.
  • Noel outlives three of his four children: his sons William, who dies when his ship is sunk, and Edward, who dies working on the Burmese railway, and his daughter Isabel, who's shot while escaping.
  • Uncle Lim outlives his daughter Ming. Mr. Chua outlives his son Ah Hock.
• Past-Life Memories: Philip dreams back to one of his and Hayato's previous lifetimes, where he was a samurai executed for treason and Hayato was his former friend and lover turned executioner.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Fujihara has tortured and murdered his way across Malaya. Now the British army has arrived, Japan has surrendered, and Fujihara decides to take the easy way out. He asks Philip to help him. Instead Philip brings the families of Fujihara's victims, and leaves them to torture him to death.
• Purple Prose: Philip's narration gets pretty flowery at times. Like this paragraph from the first page:
  The light was fading and the scent of wet grass wove through the air like threads entwining with the perfume of the flowers, creating an intricate tapestry of fragrance. I was out on the terrace, alone as I had been for many years, on the edge of sleep, dreaming of another life. The door chimes echoed through the house, hesitant, unfamiliar in a place they seldom entered, like a cat placing a tentative paw on a path it does not habitually walk.
• The Quisling: Subverted. Everyone sees Philip as this when the Japanese take over and he becomes their interpreter. The truth is rather different.
• Reincarnation: Philip and Hayato visit a fortune-teller who says they knew each other in their past life. Hayato, a Buddhist, believes this. Philip, an Anglican, doesn't. They discuss the concept of reincarnation afterwards.
• Reincarnation Romance: Philip and Hayato. A very unhealthy, possibly one-sided romance, in this lifetime at least.
• Sadistic Choice: Philip is faced with one when the Japanese invade: stay away, which will probably mean his family's death, or work for them and try to protect his family, which will make him a traitor in the eyes of the entire country. He chooses to work for them. And his whole family are killed anyway.
• Shoot the Dog:
  • Philip's decision to work for the Japanese.
  • Done literally when an evacuee has to shoot his dogs, who won't be allowed on the ship.
• "Shut Up!" Gunshot: A fight breaks out during the party. A Chinese guest hits a Japanese guest, the other Chinese guests come to help, the other Japanese guests join in the fight, the situation is getting out of hand, and then Isabel fires a shot and everyone freezes.
  Isabel: That's enough. Do you want to wreck my father's party?
• Sole Survivor: By the end of the war Philip is the only one of the Hutton family still alive.
• Star-Crossed Lovers:
  • Hayato and Michiko. They were in love, but Michiko's family forced her to marry someone else, and she never sees Hayato again.
  • Hayato and Philip. If Philip's dream is an actual flashback to a previous lifetime, they've been trapped in a cycle of falling in love, being driven apart, and dying by each other's hands since the seventeenth century at least. They may have finally been able to bring this cycle with Hayato's death this time.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Between Isabel and William.
  Philip: With her shortened hair and wearing his clothes, Isabel could have been William...
• Sweet Polly Oliver: Isabel cuts her hair and wears her brother's clothes when the Japanese invade, in the hope that if they catch her they'll mistake her for a man. Some of the other women also cut their hair.
• Title Drop: Provided in the very first sentence.
  I was born with the gift of rain, an ancient soothsayer in an even more ancient temple once told me.
• Uncertain Doom:
  • Wu An. Philip searches for him after the war but is never able to find his or his hidden temple again.
  • Uncle Lim disappears after betraying Isabel. He may have been murdered by the resistance, he may have been Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves by the Japanese, or he may have returned to China.
• Wham Line: Two come in close succession during the party: "[Aunt Mei] has been arrested." and "We received information that the Communists have placed a bomb in your home."
• Wicked Cultured: Fujihara and Goro. A pair of serial rapists, torturers, and mass murderers who love the works of Johann Sebastian Bach and hunt all over the city to find a suitable piano. And when they find one, they murder the owner.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Wu An thinks so.
  Wu An: I have learned over the years that life has to take its own path. Look at Wen Zu and me. Even with all the warnings we had, still our lives followed the pathway that had been written down. Nothing could have changed it.
• Your Days Are Numbered: Michiko is dying of cancer.

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