They were partially armed by defected Japanese soldiers. The jungle crawls with CTs, the Malay terrorists who during this period began attacks on plantation owners who were not sufficiently anti-British, or who were anti-Communist. The ideological and ethnic soup, too, which was British Malaya in the 1950s is wonderfully sketched. Magnus's wife is a fantastic character: outspoken, long-living, a practical survivor to contrast the idealistic Yun Ling. Eng is impatient with simplification, however, and so this novel sprawls in welcome fashion across many years and includes a whole host of moral shadings. If this were a Merchant Ivory film of the 1990s this courtship would eclipse all else. Her life, if she follows Aritomo's instruction, is to become like the garden itself, a place of peace. The most important principle Aritomo instructs Yun Ling in is that of shakkei, the art of borrowed scenery, "taking elements and views from outside a garden and making them integral to his creation." As her time on the estate stretches to months, Yun Ling learns to see the rising forces of nationalism in Malaysia, and war, as borrowed scenery. Their work is threaded through with rituals and pauses, a kind of chess game of dominance and submission that Eng choreographs fantastically well. When she expresses interest in archery, Aritomo begins to teach her this, too. He works her hard, giving her no quarter as a woman. In flashbacks that ripple with lyrical touches, Yun Ling recalls the gradual slackening of her hatred for Aritomo, who agrees to teach her how to create her garden tribute to her sister. It is a way of preserving time and reordering the world. "The Garden of Evening Mists," however, has found the perfect metaphor to marshal Yun Ling's memories into a heartbreaking tale. Eng's 2007 debut novel, "The Gift of Rain," which was set in Penang during the Japanese occupation, somehow never found an organizing principle to order the lush exuberance of his story. "The Garden of Evening Mists" is full of extremely subtle references to the interdependence of Chinese, Japanese, and Malay history and culture. Aritomo, like Lao Tzu, the Chinese court philosopher before him, walked out of his courtly position in Japan when he disagreed with what was asked of him. Japanese gardens took their inspiration in part from Chinese texts. There is a philosophy of intermingling at work, too.
In flashbacks, we learn that Yun Ling and her sister, who died while a prisoner, preserved their sanity in the camps by constructing Japanese gardens in their minds. Magnus's suggestion is not as insensitive as it seems.
0 kommentar(er)
