The Garden of Evening Mists

On a mountain above the clouds in the central highlands of Malaya lived a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan...

Teoh Yun Ling was seventeen years old when she first heard about him, but a world war would come, and a decade would pass before she would journey to see him. A survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, she has spent the last few years helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals.

Despite her hatred of the Japanese, she asks the gardener, Nakamura Aritomo, to create a memorial garden for her sister who died in the camp. He refuses, but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice ‘until the monsoon' so that she can design a garden herself.

As Yun Ling begins working in the Garden of Evening Mists, another war is raging in the hills and jungles beyond. The Malayan Emergency is entering its darkest days; communists guerrillas are murdering planters, miners and their families, seeking to take over the country by any means, while the Malayan nationalists are fighting for independence from centuries of British colonial rule.

But who is Nakamura Aritomo, and how did he come to be exiled from his homeland? And is Yun Ling's survival of the Japanese camp somehow connected to Aritomo and the Garden of Evening Mists?