Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang, Malaysia. His debut novel The Gift of Rain was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and has been widely translated. The Garden of Evening Mists won the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He divides his time between Kuala Lumpur and Cape Town.
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Also by Tan Twan Eng
The Gift of Rain
This Canons edition published in 2019 by Canongate Books
This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Myrmidon Books Ltd,
Rotterdam House, 116 Quayside, Newcastle upon Tyne, England
Copyright © Tan Twan Eng 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This novel is entirely a word of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following printed material: Winter by NP Van Wyk Louw, anthologised in the three-volume Groot Verseboek, edited by Andre P Brink and published in 2008 by NB Publishing, Cape Town, South Africa. Richard Holmes’ A Meander through Memory and Forgetting from Memory: An Anthology, edited by Harriet Harvey Wood and AS Byatt and published in 2009 by Vintage Publishing, a division of Random House.Japanese Death Poems, compiled by Yoel Hoffman and published in 1995 by Tuttle Publishing, North Clarendon, Vermont.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 389 5
eISBN 978 1 78211 019 4
Set in 11/14 pt Sabon by Falcon Oast Graphics Arts Limited, East Hoathly, East Sussex
For my sister
And
Opgedra aan A J Buys – sonder jou sou hierdie boek dubbel so lank en halfpad so goed wees. Mag jou eie mooi taal altyd gedy.
There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death.
Richard Holmes, A Meander Through Memory and Forgetting
Contents
Chapter One
On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan. Not many people would have known of him before the war, but I did. He had left his home on the rim of the sunrise to come to the central highlands of Malaya. I was seventeen years old when my sister first told me about him. A decade would pass before I travelled up to the mountains to see him.
He did not apologise for what his countrymen had done to my sister and me. Not on that rain-scratched morning when we first met, nor at any other time. What words could have healed my pain, returned my sister to me? None. And he understood that. Not many people did.
Thirty-six years
