Let me start with the good. The Garden of Evening Mists’s setting in the highlands of Pahang, Malaysia, is wonderful. It is its own character: rich and teeming with life and intrigue.
The Garden of Evening Mists is set across three different times: during the Japanese occupation of Malaya in World War II, during the Malayan Emergency, and decades after the emergency’s conclusion. It deals with the heavy aftermath of WWII by necessity. In its treatment, it argues that the Japanese occupation is still unresolved and demanding of attention.
But on the other hand, the entire novel has completely and thoroughly fetishised Japanese culture (in its gardening, kyūdō, and philosophy), to the point of outright orientalism. This is obviously crazy since this is a Malaysian novel, but this is really the bulk of the novel. I cannot believe this was written by an Asian author.
To square this orientalism with Japanese war crimes is impossible. I think it is genuinely the weakest point of the novel even with maximum interpretive charity. I could not find a way to justify it. If we considered Yun Ling’s relationship with Japanese culture as a pathological one, a Stockholm syndrome response to the atrocities she suffered, then this is not obvious. The novel revels in her study of gardening, and of her reverence of Aritomo. The reader is not remotely signalled that this may be problematic.
So I conclude that this orientalism is intentional. It is never interrogated properly, as if these concepts can somehow exist outside of the militarist and imperialist context that produced them, and that Aritomo participated in. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t aestheticise your way out of the political.
In fact, we’ve gotten to the point that I’d argue the novel tries to take a colonial tone in its treatment of the Malayan Emergency. The communists are written as a brutal terrorist threat. This is obviously a very conservative historical stance. We know, with very good hindsight, that the actions of the British in Malaya during the emergency constituted some of the worst crimes against humanity of the 20th century. None of this is mentioned. And it is damning that the flattest characters of the novel are Chinese or Malay. Is this flatness Yun Ling having internalised the colonialism? Perhaps this is why the Boers are the most dynamic characters outside of Aritomo?
What is it this novel tried to argue? Why did it make such rounds in the foremost literary awards of its day? To me, it is as if this is what Western observers of the day wanted out of postcolonial fiction: historical gravitas, aesthetic sophistication, but ultimately some kind of depoliticised moral high ground.
The novel tries to engage with difficult history while offering something consoling. Beauty over politics, personal relationships, refinement over revenge. It was indeed beautiful at times. Of course, in its attempts to do so, it loses the ability to thoughtfully engage with the difficult past.
1/5
Written 18 November 2025
Adapted from my review on Goodreads.
Notes
- there is, of course, treatment of heavy themes and subjects
- Tan probably intended for a more humanising POV. This falls short sometimes
- writing is awful and cliché
- strangely orientalist
- anti-literary at times, story choices questionable and arbitrary
- treasure hunt?
- the gay Japanese kamikaze pilot
- garden plan fitting in the unfinished tattoo space
- very evocative of the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/417569847 my basic opinion