Many good reviews are available on Goodreads and I encourage you to read those. I intend to write my own reflection after reading the book, not a review.
The last time I went to the Cameroon Highlands must have been 40 years ago, I haven't been back since. But reading this book certainly brings back a lot of memories and for once, I was able to visualise the place described by the author, fictitious maybe, but real enough for me. I must confess that I am not an avid reader of local Singaporean literature and this is the first time I venture into Malaysian literature. The experience of trying to imagine the place as described is an interesting one, familiar, yet not being able to call my own. It is not only the places, the language also has that same effect on me. The author made liberal use of Bahasa Malaysia, a language which I cannot claim to be fluent at but still knowing enough to make out what was being said. Others, like Cold Storage is also comfortingly familiar though could pose a problem to readers unfamiliar with the supermarket chain that has been around for more than a hundred years.
I came to know of this book after sitting through two back-to-back paper presentations in a conference that focused on this book. I read it because one of them referred to this book as 'fiction augmenting history', in particular WW2 history. A huge part of the book focuses on the time a few years after the war, when Yun Ling took up an apprenticeship with Aritomo. This was augmented with significant parts of contemporary times, and completing it were small sections on Yun Ling's experience in the internment camp. Among the few thread that ran through the book, the evolution of Yun Ling's attitude towards her captors struck me most. How she must have first hated the Japanese because of their treatment of her and her sister, to slowly embracing the culture (gardening and archery amongst them) and finally as she reached her own retirement age, being more interested in finding the truth than settling scores.
This is how people in Southeast Asia have changed over the 7 decades after the war, except that, most of us have moved on to another phase - consigning the whole national experience to history whether we know the truth or not. Just like the two goddesses mentioned in the book, Mnemosyne, the goddess of Memory and her twin sister, the goddess of Forgetting, whose name we cannot remember anymore, some things we choose to remember, others we choose to forget.
