Somehow – and for what dark purpose? – the imperial gardener has returned to postwar Malaya to exercise his talent for the visual feints and ruses of shakkei – “borrowed scenery”. The narrator surmises that even the horrors and discordant. In the early 1950s, as a rebellious young prosecutor furious that the British rulers of Malaya have done so little to help victims of Japanese war crimes, she fled to the highlands to learn garden design from the shape-shifting Aritomo. In a world ravaged as much by haunting memories as the physical debris of war, the final pages of the book offer glimmers of hope. In the present – given the chronology, the late 1980s – Yun Ling writes her memoirs before the aphasic dementia that has begun to afflict her reduces language and memory to trackless jungle. Tan’s fictional garden moves between three levels, which never quite coincide. After the Japanese invasion, she suffered almost-unspeakable hardship as a “Guest of the Emperor” in a remote jungle prison camp, where her beloved sister Yun Hong died. Our narrator here is Teoh Yun Ling, a Girton-educated retired judge in independent Malaysia, born in 1923 and brought up among the loyal colonial elite (“the King’s Chinese”) of Penang. The tale begins when she is in her late twenties, after she has given up her job as a prosecutor, a role she performed for only a few years following the war.
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