Teoh Yun Ling, one of Malaysia's first female judges, is retiring and returns to The Garden Of Evening Mists where she first met Nakamura Aritomo nearly forty years earlier. The garden is an important character in the book and shows the brutal control of nature needed to create beauty and peace in the garden. Gardens are also used to showcase colonialism through the image of formal English gardens where the indigenous species are pushed out and the invaders celebrated. Yet the garden also serves as a place of peace, solace and escape. I found the use of this imagery to be very clever, very subtle and very, very powerful.

The Garden Of Evening Mists is an exquisitely sad novel of bittersweet memory that is brutal in its portrayal of the damage done to lives, families, societies and Nations by colonialism and war. It is beautifully written and a joy to read, despite the inherent sadness in the decline of Teoh and her garden, yet like the tea from the Majuba Estate and the garden at Yugiri, this is a book to savour, to roll around the tongue, to enjoy and not to rush. The Garden Of Evening Mists evokes both the Malay and Japanese cultures and heritage, and is a book I will treasure – I am already looking forward to rereading it.