Tan Twan Eng's imagined garden comes to satisfying life on the silver screen

'They've retained the heart and soul and mood of my book, ' a happy Tan says of the movie adaptation of his book, 'The Garden Of Evening Mists'. — AZLINA BT ABDULLAH/The Star

For a fictional garden, Yugiri is becoming quite well-known. The Japanese garden is at the core of Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden Of Evening Mists. It’s the place the novel’s protagonist, Yun Ling, a survivor of a Japanese prisoner of war camp, retreats to in her search for peace and memories of her late sister.

While there is a lot of historical detail in the novel, Yugiri is an imagined place, put together from bits of many gardens Tan visited.