to be read

The story, set in 1936, begins when a young Chinese man moves from Hong Kong to his family's summer home in a Japanese seaside village to convalesce from tuberculosis. There, he is cared for by the family's employee and housekeeper, Matsu. With each changing season, we learn more about the protagonist and his family, his quiet housekeeper, the residents of the village, and members of an ostracized leper colony in a nearby village. The story is infused with the quiet, meditative quality of a formal Japanese garden, and everything from the darkest family secrets to the atrocities of the Japanese invasion of China are couched within the stillness of the garden.

Traded in at Bookman's East