The Garden of Evening Mists. Tan Twan Eng

      

      Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang, Malaysia. His debut novel The Gift of Rain was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and has been widely translated. The Garden of Evening Mists won the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He divides his time between Kuala Lumpur and Cape Town.

      tantwaneng.com

      Also by Tan Twan Eng

       The Gift of Rain

      This Canons edition published in 2019 by Canongate Books

      This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books

      First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Myrmidon Books Ltd,

      Rotterdam House, 116 Quayside, Newcastle upon Tyne, England

       canongate.co.uk

      Copyright © Tan Twan Eng 2012

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      This novel is entirely a word of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following printed material: Winter by NP Van Wyk Louw, anthologised in the three-volume Groot Verseboek, edited by Andre P Brink and published in 2008 by NB Publishing, Cape Town, South Africa. Richard Holmes’ A Meander through Memory and Forgetting from Memory: An Anthology, edited by Harriet Harvey Wood and AS Byatt and published in 2009 by Vintage Publishing, a division of Random House.Japanese Death Poems, compiled by Yoel Hoffman and published in 1995 by Tuttle Publishing, North Clarendon, Vermont.

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 78689 389 5

       eISBN 978 1 78211 019 4

      Set in 11/14 pt Sabon by Falcon Oast Graphics Arts Limited, East Hoathly, East Sussex

      For my sister

      And

      Opgedra aan A J Buys – sonder jou sou hierdie boek dubbel so lank en halfpad so goed wees. Mag jou eie mooi taal altyd gedy.

       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.

      Richard Holmes, A Meander Through Memory and Forgetting

      Contents

       Chapter One

       Chapter Two

       Chapter Three

       Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Chapter Fourteen

       Chapter Fifteen

       Chapter Sixteen

       Chapter Seventeen

       Chapter Eighteen

       Chapter Nineteen

       Chapter Twenty

       Chapter Twenty-One

       Chapter Twenty-Two

       Chapter Twenty-Three

       Chapter Twenty-Four

       Chapter Twenty-Five

       Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter One

      On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan. Not many people would have known of him before the war, but I did. He had left his home on the rim of the sunrise to come to the central highlands of Malaya. I was seventeen years old when my sister first told me about him. A decade would pass before I travelled up to the mountains to see him.

      He did not apologise for what his countrymen had done to my sister and me. Not on that rain-scratched morning when we first met, nor at any other time. What words could have healed my pain, returned my sister to me? None. And he understood that. Not many people did.

      Thirty-six years after that morning, I hear his voice again, hollow and resonant. Memories I had locked away have begun to break free, like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf. In sleep, these broken floes drift towards the morning light of remembrance.

      The stillness of the mountains awakens me. The depth of the silence: that is what I had forgotten about living in Yugiri. The murmurings of the house hover in the air when I open my eyes. An old house retains its hoard of memories, I remember Aritomo telling me once.

      Ah Cheong knocks on the door and calls softly to me. I get out of bed and put on my dressing gown. I look around for my gloves and find them on the bedside table. Pulling them over my hands, I tell the housekeeper to come in. He enters and sets the pewter tray with a pot of tea and a plate of cut papaya on a side table; he had done the same for Aritomo every morning. He turns to me and says, ‘I wish you a long and peaceful retirement, Judge Teoh.’

      ‘Yes, it seems I’ve beaten you to it.’ He is, I calculate, five or six years older than me. He was not here when I arrived yesterday evening. I study