The Samurai's Garden

The Samurai’s Garden tells the story of Stephen Chan, a 20-year-old Chinese painter, writer, and student who, at the urging of his upper-middle-class parents, leaves school in Canton to spend a year recuperating from an undisclosed illness at his family’s beach house in Tarumi, Japan. The narrative present of the novel is set during the first year of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945).

The novel is character-driven. Stephen’s traditional Chinese mother lives at the family home in Hong Kong with Stephen’s sister Pie, with whom he is close; his Westernized father stays mainly at an apartment in Japan, on business, and is having an affair. As the Japanese army sweeps through China, Stephen becomes close to Matsu, the “samurai” who has long been the caretaker of the beach house and its garden, and Matsu’s longtime love Sachi, who suffers from leprosy and lives in the nearby leper colony of Yamaguchi. Sachi and Matsu live lives haunted by suicide: there is Sachi’s attempted seppuku;Matsu’s sister Tomoko’s successful seppuku, many years ago; and Matsu and Sachi’s childhood friend Kenzo’s hanging in present day. Stephen falls for a beautiful Tarumi villager named

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