The Garden of Evening Mists

The Garden of Evening Mists is the second English-language novel by the Malaysian novelist Tan Twan Eng, first published in November 2011. The book follows Teoh Yun Ling, a prisoner of the Japanese during the Second World War who later became a judge overseeing war crimes cases.

After the war Yun Ling wants a garden in memory of her sister, who was imprisoned with her and did not survive, and she asks Nakamura Aritomo, the former imperial gardener, to design it. He refuses, but agrees to take her as an apprentice until the monsoon so that she can design one herself, and she stays at the home of Magnus Pretorius, the owner of a tea estate and a veteran of the Boer War. She has spent the years since the camp helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, and the man she goes to see is the former gardener of the Emperor of Japan.

The novel is set during three different periods: the late 1980s, when Yun Ling returns to the Japanese garden of her apprenticeship, the years of that apprenticeship during the Malayan Emergency, and the war itself. That structure is why the book is read as a novel about memory rather than as a straightforward historical narrative.