The Garden of Evening Mists

By: Tan Twan Eng

Narrated by: Anna Bentinck

Length: 15 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of Cameron Highlands. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the emperor of Japan.

Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her sister, who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice "until the monsoon comes". Then she can design a garden for herself.

As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn to the gardener and his art, while all around them a communist guerilla war rages. But the Garden of Evening Mists remains a place of mystery. Who is Aritomo and how did he come to leave Japan? And is the real story of how Yun Ling managed to survive the war perhaps the darkest secret of all?

©2012 Tan Twan Eng (P)2012 W.F. Howes

This Book is Absolute Perfection

With most books, the author either has you root for the main character (despite their flaws), or has you love the main character because they're so darn cool. It takes incredible skill and enormous courage for an author to force the reader to squirm from discomfort because we may not actually LIKE the main character and we may not find much endearing about her at all. We may not actually be able to forgive some actions of the main character but it doesn't mean we're not with her throughout the story, keeping her at a distance but utterly engrossed.

That kind of writing happens once in a blue moon but Tan Twan Eng has done it. This novel is pure poetry. It forces the reader to question their own morality, to ask themselves "Do I REALLY know what I would do in such a situation? Do I have the right to judge others, having never been in those circumstances?"

Anna Bentinck does a brilliant job. Her accents are fantastic (though admittedly not always accurate) and she portrays the main character with the perfect amount of "chilliness".

Early on in the book, I immediately judged the Professor as some bit player, an insignificant nobody. However, as the book unfolds, the Professor, as a human being, becomes heartbreakingly unforgettable.

This is my favorite book of all time. I'm desperate for Audible to have his other book, Gift of Rain, narrated.

A Work of Art

Any additional comments?

Without question the most beautifully written and narrated book I've had the pleasure to listen to.

Beautiful story.

Well written. Very descriptive. At times the flag back. Are hard to place in the time line. Narrator could have tried different accents or just read it without an accent. I will read this book again to try and get more details in the correct timeline.

Extraordinary in every way

Beautiful writing. A revelation of Malaysian culture and history. Insight into Asian differences. Memorable and deeply moving. A treasure.

Great book. Just don’t listen to it.

The book itself is fantastic. Highly recommended you read it. But skip the Audible version. As long as the narrator is telling the story, it’s fine. But once she tries a character’s voice, speaking in the dialect of a Japanese or Malaysian or any human, it starts grating on your nerves. Like nails on a chalkboard. A bad Mel Blanc impression.

A tale of good and evil in all of us

A beautiful symphonic tale of the art of Japanese gardening and tattooing, coexisting with torture and suffering. Themes of love in different forms, betrayal and redemption.

nice story despite terrible narration

Where does The Garden of Evening Mists rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

this narrator took on many characters from many parts of the world- and should have simple read it in her normal voice. her "accents" are terrible.
the story is lovely.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

stunning visuals

Mists of memory

The Garden of Evening Mists- Tan Eng



“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 toward the morning light of remembrance.”


When Yun Ling first comes to Yugiri in the decade following World War Two she remembers her sister’s death and their three years in a Japanese death camp. When she returns to Yugiri 40 years later, she remembers Aritomo. Aritomo, once the Japanese emperor’s gardener, created Yugiri, the Garden of Evening Mists. The garden was designed and built before the war in the Camaron Highlands of Malaya. Yun Ling has spent most of her life trying to forget, but as her aging brain threatens to erase her memories forever, she begins to record her story.

This is an intricate, layered story that worked beautifully on every level. The prose is poetic and suited to the exotic location. As the story develops, it is filled with details about Japanese gardens, woodblock printing, and surprisingly, tattoos. The characters are flawed, complex, and very real. They are people who grapple with devastating loss, survivor guilt, divided loyalties, and dangerous secrets. In the end some of the secrets are revealed. Some of the truth will never be completely revealed. Despite the lack of definitive answers, the ending of the book felt entirely correct.

Anna Bentinck’s performance of this book was outstanding. She handled all of the character voices and accents perfectly. I was especially impressed that she was able to maintain a consistent voice for Yun Ling while perceptibly aging the voice for the different time periods of the narrative.

A trip to Malaysia in my Mind

This book, beautifully written, brought me back to my own time in Malaysia and Singapore. I loved disappearing into it each day. The reading was well done and caught the accents from the region in a fair manner. However, I did find the book a bit long in places especially the earlier and middle chapters.

"Everything Beautiful and Sorrowful About Life"

'On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan.'

Teoh Yun Ling retires from her position as a Supreme Court judge in the courts of Kuala Lumpur after discovering that she has aphasia, a disease that will soon render her unable to communicate (already she has flashes where she recognizes nothing). Questioning what she will become when she is cut off from the world, she realizes that the memories she has worked hard to forget will be her only anchor to the real world, without them she will be "a ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity." Remembering will require her to uncover that past - - this is Yun Ling's story.

When her affluent family is captured during the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, Yun Ling and her sister are sent to a brutal prisoner of war camp. The girls find solace from the cruelties the Japanese soldiers inflict upon them by remembering a beautiful Japanese garden they once visited in Kyoto. Only Yun Ling survives the camp, and sets out to create a Japanese garden to honor her sister. Her mission takes her to Yugiri - the mountain "garden of evening mists" and its master gardener Aritomo, former gardener for Emperor Hirohito. To complete her quest, she must reckon her bitter resentment of all things Japanese to become Aritomo's apprentice. In the process, Yun Ling begins to recall all the horrors of her past, what it really took for her to survive, and the involvement of her Japanese teacher, Aritomo.

This is a complex and layered novel with intertwined themes of remembering and forgetting, moral ambiguity, scars and healing, and other characters with back stories of their own. The metaphors of the garden become the words too painful for the haunted characters to vocalize; the cycle of the garden carries the story through to the realization and self-healing. Author Tan Twan Eng also uses the cultural practices of Zen philosophy, the cultivation of tea, archery, and the secretive art of horimono (Japanese body tattoo) to shape the characters and reflect their journeys.

Reader's that enjoy all of the nuances of frost melting on a stone, or the slow twirling descent of a leaf from a tree, will find this book to be an exquisite journey that "captures everything beautiful and sorrowful about life." It is so beautifully constructed that there isn't a single flaw, and reminded me of looking at an orchid and contemplating the pure beauty. But, like a garden growing...it is a slow process that sometimes seemed like watching grass grow. I'm not saying I didn't like this--only that it is like taking baby steps through a journey of a thousand miles. One complaint I do have is the narrator. Her voice is lovely--very English--but the accents she uses for the characters are so inconsistent and off that she often confounds the story, making it hard to follow. I would have preferred to hear her read without the characterizations. Ethereal and transcendent, somewhat like tai chi...slow and meditative, good selection for the right kind of reader.