On a Path towards Forgiveness: Garden-Practices and Aesthetics of Engagement in Tan Twan Eng’s

Abstract

This paper examines the human-nature relationship in the art of Japanese gardening in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists (2012). Drawing upon the aesthetics of Japanese gardening and theories of garden art, it argues that the novel advocates the complementarity of nature and human artifice in gardening. Japanese gardening which is related to the Taoist concept of yinyang and the Buddhist notion of impermanence, together with its principle of shakkei (borrowed landscape), suggests a combination of anthropocentric and ecocentric relationships with nature. Moreover, since Japanese aesthetics is interwoven with ways of living, the paper examines how the female protagonist’s apprenticeship to a Japanese gardener in the Cameron Highlands of Malaya gradually alters her mind and opens up ways of coping with her traumatic experience, during the Occupation, in a Japanese internment camp. It argues that gardening art, what art philosopher Arnold Berleant calls the “aesthetics of engagement,” and changing gardenscape induce the protagonist to comprehend impermanence, moral ambiguity and the complementary co-existence of memory and forgetting, all of which enable her to forgive the Japanese transgressors and to make peace with the past.