Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, Myrmidon books 2012

After ages I have read something so hauntingly beautiful , so mystical, so romantic and yet so sad. I simply raced through the pages of this lovely historical novel only to be left completely mesmerised by the magic of Twan's narrative .
The story is told in flashback. Yun Ling is a retired judge battling the onset of dementia .Before her mind fails her she wants to capture her memories in words.
Below is a quote from http://www.tantwaneng.com/

"On a mountain above the clouds, in the central highlands of Malaya lived the 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 war would come, and a decade would pass before she travels up to the Garden of Evening Mists to see him, in 1951. A survivor of a brutal Japanese 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 she can design a garden herself.

Staying at the home of Magnus Pretorius, the owner of Majuba Tea Estate and a veteran of the Boer War, Yun Ling begins working in the Garden of Evening Mists. But outside in the surrounding jungles another war is raging. The Malayan Emergency is entering its darkest days, the communist-terrorists murdering planters and 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."

For Aritomo creating the garden  is almost like being on a spiritual journey. As his disciple and later his lover Yun Ling becomes part of this spiritual quest. There are lot of cultural similarities with India which I could relate to .The descriptions of the workers' lives in the tea gardens, the atrocities carried out inside the camps and the exploitation of women who are treated as commodities and slaves, the lifelong love and friendship of  two adults who could have married yet both chose to remain single, the almost spiritual personal love story of two human beings belonging to enemy camps in the public eye, how an adopted country and its people can mean  so much to someone that you end up by paying with your life  and above all the beautiful descriptions of the Malayan landscape - all contribute towards making this novel intensely likeable.The book has intimate details of the Japanese tattoo art form, which is quite fascinating to read.
Twan's language is beautiful , almost philosophical at times. The language is languid and slow at times and at times open to interpretation because of the philosophy behind the words.This is a must read for all .