"The garden of evening mists" by Tan Twan Eng

An audio book.

The epiphet points out that there's a goddess of memory but not of forgetting. Later in the book somebody points out that we may have forgotten that there was a goddess of forgetting.

The narrator, Teoh Yun Ling, a respected female judge in Malaysia, has just retired earlier than she needed to. She's been told that in the coming year she'll forget a lot. She has bouts when she doesn't understand language. "Memories I had locked away had begun to break free like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf. In sleep these broken floes drift towards the morning of remembrance". After spending so much of her life wanting to forget, she now wants to remember - "I pull myself from the quicksand of memories". She'd spent 3 years in a Japanese prison camp. She was maimed there (2 fingers cut off for smuggling food from the kichen). Her sister was a whore for the soldiers. Teoh became a translator for the camp leader. She was let out just before everybody else was killed. She'd been an informer.

There's a mix of cultures - Japanese, Chinese, Malay - combined with mock tudor buildings. Mangus came from the South Africa, married to Emily. Mandarin, Malay, Tamil, English and Japanese is spoken.

In her 20s she was a researcher for the War Crimes Trials, trying to find out where her sister was buried. She studied Law at Girton college, Cambridge. Aritomo was a gardener - Japanese. She wanted him to design a garden in memory of her sister. He'd only do the job if she became her apprentice. He'd the palace gardener for Hirohito. He taught her the ancient wisdom of garden design. She became his lover. She's warned that she mght be a target for CT (Chinese Terrorists), having sentenced them in the past. Her servant's brother wants to surrender (he gets a reward for doing so). She helps. The new High Commissioner visits. His security entourage say to Cho that they suspect Magnus of helping (or paying protection money to) the CT. And they don't trust the Aritomo either. They want Teoh to spy for them. Aritomo had already given Mangus a tattoo. He wants to give the narrator a big one, on her back - with a garden theme. Having finished the tattoo he disappeared, leaving a letter to be sent to his son. Aritomo was the last to see the tattoo - no other lovers.

Returning to the mountains after 36 years she sees a heron like the one she saw 40 years ago. She'd like it to be the same one. She wants to restore the garden to the way it was, but there's no plan to follow. Frederick (67) is the house-keeper. Long ago she slept with him. She says she wants to sell off Aritomo's woodcuts. She calls Tatsuji, who's writing a book about Aritomo. She shows him her tattoo, saying she'd like it preserved after her death. He tells her that the Japanese used Malaya to hide treasures (the "Golden Lily" project), and that Aritomo might have been involved with selecting sites etc. She realises that her camp might have been a site.

In a framed story Tatsujia tells how he was Japanese suicide pilot and had to abort because his plane was broken. He met his teacher who wanted to sabotage the plane - were they in love? The pilot's father was a plane designer who killed himself in the pilot's presence, in shame.

The CT raid again, taking Mangus and killing him. Emily dies soon after. Mangus hadn't been paying protection money - the gardener had been, for her sake.

Bats were "trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly. Are all of us the same I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the unspoken moments of our memory?". Fredrick offers to nurse her.

I didn't realise how plotty the book was until later. I enjoyed the book. I didn't like the phrase "light brown in colour". The concentration-like details aren't new, alas.

Other reviews

• Kapka Kassabova (informative, if bland ... The reason I found it impossible to love is the quality of the writing. There is no discernible personality in the dutiful, dull voice of Yun Ling, and non-events stalk us on every page ... The self-conscious dialogue resembles a history lesson collated for the benefit of the western reader, and everything is ponderously "like" something else, so it takes twice as long)
• liketellingthetruth
• maxxesbooktopia (The pacing is not the best part of the novel. I thought it dragged sometimes and some scenes in the novel flew by too quickly. For example, the scenes about the guerrillas went by so quickly that I cannot actually understand the guerrillas intentions and why they did what they did. The scenes that dragged are normally scenes that can be cut out of the novel and it will make no difference in the end)
• goodreads
• an interview, with a sketch of the garden