Why a Booktrail?
1949: The title reads like music and the story itself is like ying and yang – peaceful yet turbulent, quiet and noisy but the Garden of Evening Mists reveals so much..
The Garden of Evening Mists
What you need to know before your trail
Yun Ling Teoh is a scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp. She has studied law in Cambridge and helped to proseute war criminals yet when she returns to the gardens of Northern Malaya where she grew up as a child, things start to happen.
She discover the only Japanese garden in Malaya – Yugiri, – whose owner and creator, Aritomo, is as exuberant and passionate as his flowered creations. He was once the former gardener of the Emperor of Japan but is now exiled.
Yun Ling is there to keep the memory of her sister alive and wants to build a garden in Kuala Lumpur but her hatred of the Japanese is still strong.
But this garden – the Garden of Evening Mists is a mysterious place where all kinds of things are hidden, healed and revealed in equal measure.
Travel Guide
Even the name – The Garden of Evening Mists is so beautiful that it makes you want to step inside and explore. Being a place of mystery makes it all the more alluring and as we find our way through we also come to see what is hidden and what can and will be revealed to Yun Ling.
There are many questions tied up in this garden which is surrounded by the guerrillas threat of kidnap and murder so as danger lies outside so does it creep inside too. The legend and meaning of the garden is revealed like a loosening thread weaving its way around you until you realise what has happened. the legend of ‘Yamashita’s Gold’ is fascinating as is the effect of the country’s problems on its people and land.
As Yun Ling returns to her native land, it and she have changed and the garden – the cycle of life and death – is the perfect landscape for this story to unfold.
Kuala Lumpur, in memory of her sister who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses, but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice ‘until the monsoon comes’. Then she can design a garden for herself. As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn to her sensei and his art while, outside the garden, the threat of murder and kidnapping from the guerrillas of the jungle hinterland increases with each passing day.
Streetview Maps
Tanah Rata
Cameron Highlands
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