The Garden of Evening Mists is a 2011 historical novel by Tan Twan Eng. It's set in Malaysia during three different decades: the 1940s, when Malaya was invaded by Imperial Japan; the 50s, when communists are trying to take over Malaysia; and the 80s, where the book begins and ends.
Teoh Yun Ling retires from the Supreme Court of Malaysia and returns to the Cameron Highlands. Thirty years earlier she went there to see Nakamura Aritomo, Hirohito's former gardener. Yun Ling wanted Aritomo to design a memorial garden for her sister Yun Hong, who died in a Japanese prison camp. Aritomo refused, but took her on as an apprentice. Now Yun Ling has returned to Aritomo's garden and is beginning to write her memoir.
A film adaptation was released in 2019.
Contains examples of:
- Age-Gap Romance: Tatsuji is eighteen and Teruzen is in his thirties or forties when they begin a relationship. Oh, and Teruzen was Tatsuji's instructor when he was training to be a pilot. Tatsuji doesn't see either of these facts as important; he's much more worried by the fact Teruzen is married.
- Bisexual Love Triangle: Tatsuji and Teruzen love each other, but Teruzen is married to Noriko. Tatsuji decides to break up with Teruzen. They get back together after Noriko's death.
- Buried Alive: The fate of Yun Hong and the other prisoners — and most of the guards — associated with Golden Lily. They dug mines to hide the stolen treasures, and when Japan surrenders, the camp leaders herd them into the mines then blow up the entrances.
- Captain Obvious: Yun Ling tells Magnus she wants a Japanese garden, but objects when he suggests she goes to Aritomo.Yun Ling: He's a Jap.Magnus: Well, if you want a Japanese garden...
- Character Overlap: Yun Ling makes a blink-and-you'll-miss it mention of the Hutton family, who stayed in Malaya when the Japanese invaded. Philip Hutton was the protagonist of Tan Twan Eng's first novel The Gift of Rain.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Tim, one of the prisoners in Yun Ling's camp, has a tattoo on his arm that says "God Save The King". This offends the guards. So they remove the tattoo... by cutting out a chunk of his arm. Tim dies soon afterwards.
- Deadly Euphemism: Yun Hong and Yun Ling weren't prisoners, they were "guests of the emperor". And Yun Hong wasn't a Sex Slave, she was a "comfort woman".
- Death by Childbirth: Asuka, Aritomo's wife, died giving birth to their only child.
- Dirty Communists: The Malaysian communists (supported by Mao and the Chinese Communist Party) are a threat during the 1950s section. Magnus is murdered by them.
- Downer Ending: Yun Ling was never able to design a Japanese garden in memory of Yun Hong. She outlives all of her friends except Frederik, and never had any lovers after Aritomo's death. And she's suffering from steadily-worsening aphasia that will soon leave her unable to communicate or understand.
- Driven to Suicide:
- Tominaga committed seppuku after Japan surrendered.
- Tatsuji's father committed seppuku when Tatsuji volunteered as a kamikaze pilot.
- Epigraph: The book starts with a quotation from Richard Holmes' A Meander Through Memory and Forgetting: "There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death."
- Fingore: Fumio cuts off two of Yun Ling's fingers.
- Flashback Within a Flashback: Yun Ling, writing in the 1980s, describes how back in the 1950s she and Aritomo visited a temple, and Aritomo asked her about her experience in the camp. Yun Ling tells him, providing another flashback to the 1940s.
- Framing Device: The book starts and ends in the 1980s section, where Yun Ling returns to Yugiri, meets Tatsuji, and begins work on her memoirs.
- Genuine Human Hide: Tatsuji mentions in passing that he visited a museum of tattoos — meaning that after the tattooed person died, they were skinned and the preserved skin was put on display. Yun Ling briefly considers signing a paper that would allow him to preserve her tattoo in this way when she dies.
- Gratuitous Foreign Language: In addition to English, the dialogue contains words, phrases, and sentences of Afrikaans, Chinese, Japanese and Malay.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Tatsuji was sent on a suicide mission, and he refuses to disobey orders. Teruzen saves his life in the only way he can: he steals his plane and goes on the suicide mission in his place.
- Historical Domain Character: Various historical figures are mentioned in passing, including Hirohito and Mao. Emily mentions Han Suyin visited Majuba and asks if it's true her book will be turned into a film. (It was.)
- Honor Before Reason: Tatsuji doesn't want to be a kamikaze pilot. He especially doesn't want to leave Teruzen, who he's just been reunited with and fallen in love with again. But he volunteered for the programme and he has his orders, so he tries to carry out his mission. The first time he's forced to turn back because of bad weather. In spite of this he insists on trying again.
- Human Notepad: A variant. Aritomo gives Yun Ling a horimono tattoo. Years later she discovers he hid a map to the treasure amidst the tattoo's designs.
- Map All Along: Yun Ling's tattoo is a map to where Golden Lily hid the stolen treasures.
- Neglected Garden: Yun Ling walks around Yugiri to see how it's changed over the years, and is sad to see that it's become wild and disordered since Aritomo's death.
- Never Found the Body: Aritomo walks off into the rainforest one day and is never seen again.
- Not What It Looks Like: Yun Ling sees Tominaga visit the brothel where Yun Hong and the other women are kept as Sex Slaves. She assumes he went to rape one of them and is disgusted with him. Years later Aritomo tells her that Tominaga was gay, so he really did only go there to speak to Yun Hong.
- Outliving One's Offspring:
- Magnus and Emily outlive their only daughter.
- Aritomo outlives his baby, who dies along with Asuka.
- Passed in Their Sleep: Emily dies in her sleep, while the record of Magnus's favourite music plays in the background.
- Purple Prose / Scenery Porn: Yun Ling spares no effort in describing how beautiful Yugiri is.
- Scatterbrained Senior: Played for drama.
- Yun Ling is developing aphasia, meaning she is losing the ability to read, understand speech, and remember.
- Emily is losing the ability to distinguish between the past and present. When Yun Ling and Frederik visit her, she starts talking about things that happened years ago as if they were recent.
- Sexy Discretion Shot:
- Yun Ling invites Frederik into her cottage, ostensibly to help her put salve on her injured elbow. Cut to several days later, and Yun Ling's narration admits they slept together that night.
- Yun Ling kisses Aritomo. Then they go into the house, and... cut to a while later.
- Shout-Out:
- Yugiri was the name of Genji's son in The Tale of Genji.
- Teruzen quotes a line of Yeats' poem An Irish Airman Foresees His Death: "I know that I shall meet my fate, somewhere among the clouds above..."
- Sole Survivor:
- Yun Ling is the only prisoner to survive the camp.
- Tatsuji is the only one from his group of kamikaze pilots who survives.
- Troubled Sympathetic Bigot: In the 1950s plot, Yun Ling hates all Japanese people for what the Japanese army did. Magnus, who was sent to a POW camp and whose sister died in a concentration camp during the Second Boer War, warns her against this attitude. Yun Ling asks if he's forgiven the English for what he suffered.Magnus: They couldn’t kill me when we were at war. And they couldn’t kill me when I was in the camp. But holding on to my hatred for forty-six years... that would have killed me. [...] So listen to me. Listen to an old man... Don’t despise all Japanese for what some of them did. Let it go, this hatred in you. Let it go.
- Uncertain Doom: Aritomo disappears without trace. By the 1980s timeline he's almost certainly dead, of old age if nothing else, and Yun Ling always refers to his death rather than his disappearance. It's left ambiguous what happened to him, though: did he deliberately set out to kill himself or did he just get lost? Was he murdered by communists? Killed by wild animals? Wandered around in the jungle until he died of thirst?
- Younger Than They Look: Years in a prison camp have made Yun Ling look much older than she is. When they first meet, Aritomo asks if she's thirty-three or thirty-four. She's actually twenty-eight.
