Tan Twan Eng : Garden of Evening Mists

This story primarily serves as a vehicle for the author, a business-class Straits Chinese,  to express his admiration, and perhaps even sexual attraction,  for aristocratic Japanese culture.

The principal protagonist is a well-born Chinese woman from Penang, Ling,  who is the only survivor of a  remote slave labor camp run by the Japanese military in WWII.  Upon release, she graduates law school and soon is prosecuting Japanese war criminals. She is unhappy, bitter, and guilty that her sister, an artist, was left behind to die in the horrific conditions of the camp.  Her terminally bad attitude gets her fired, after which she visits a former business associate of her father, a Dutchman who owns a tea plantation in the Cameron highlands, a scenic area not far from Kuala Lumpur.  She then visits his neighbor, Aritomo, who is building an elaborate Japanese garden .  He's not just any gardener.  He used to be the chief gardener for Hirohito, the  Emperor of Japan.

As it turns out, he's also a master of  Zen archery, martial art, woodblock printing, and full-body, horimono tattoos.  Ling asks Aritomo to design a formal Japanese garden in memory of her sister. He declines, but offers to apprentice her so she can learn to design such a garden herself. She accepts. He also teachers her  Zen archery and inks a horitomo on her back. Eventually they share a bed -- though they both seem too cold to be called 'lovers'.

Soon after being visited by a\ Japanese delegation who bear the emperor's invitation to return to the imperial  gardens, he is seen walking into the rainforest - from which he never returns. Forty years later, Ling, who subsequently was appointed to the Supreme Court of Malaysia, returns to what remains of the garden, which had been deeded to her.  She allows an enthusiast of woodblock prints to see her collection of Aritomo's work, and he reveals that when a schematic plan of the garden is combined with the tattoo on her back, the location where hidden slave labor camp can be found. That might also suggest that Aritomo may well have been one of the many Japanese agents sent into southeast Asia to gather intelligence and make preparations for the Japanese military invasion that would follow.  Other details dropped along the way, suggest that the purpose of that labor camp was to excvate a cave in a mountainside into which wartime plunder could be hidden until the imperial family was finally in a position to retrieve it. Ling's sister, as well as all the prisoners and their guards, had been buried alive to keep that location a secret.

Ouch.

Aritomo is something of a war criminal himself.

And as Ling reveals to him, she survived the death camp by consistently betraying her fellow prisoners.

There no happy-ever-afters for these two sexual partners. Ling even rejects a creepy offer to purchase her tattoo post-mortem ---- so it will vanish when she does.

What will not vanish, however, is the voice that the author has given her -- the persistently calm and rational voice that tells this story.  It's both tough and gentle, with a taste for selected fine detail.   

She is recognized, by those who have read her legal opinions, as a concise, perceptive writer. There's no small irony in the fact that this woman, professionally dedicated to delivering justice to the Japanese who killed, raped, and abused so many Chinese--- has eventually come to allow a Japanese agent to fuck and tattoo her after having her labor in his garden.