Yun Ling is the only survivor from a hidden Japanese prison camp in Malaya’s highlands during the second world war. Trying to swallow her hatred of the Japanese, she becomes an apprentice to the skilled Aritomo to learn the techniques of creating a Japanese garden she wishes to dedicate to the sister she lost in the prison camp. But there are secrets she wants to uncover — where was the prison camp she was locked up in for over three years? Where are her sister’s bones? Why has Aritomo never returned to Japan?
This is an insight into Malay before independence and its struggles to overcome WWII and the internal fighting after the war as well as principles in designing a Japanese garden.
In the late 1940s the youngest pearl diver works on Shodo Island. But four years after diving off the waters of Japan, she’s rejected by her family and society when she contracts leprosy. Sent to a leper colony on Nagashina Island, her disease doesn’t spread once a new medicine is discovered, but can she regain her freedom to live a normal life again?
When Theo returns to Sri Lanka from London to write his novel he is distracted by Nulani who draws him out of his beach side home. After Mrs Mendis reminds him of earlier racial riots when her husband was drenched in petrol and set alight, Theo cannot shut out the rising racial tension outside his door, nor his love for Nulani.
Can their love survive when Theo’s Sinhalese ethnic group is rioting against Nulani’s Tamil minority?
When I first began this book, I expected it to be like White chrysanthemum because both books focus on Haenyeo women of Jeju Island, South Korea, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. White Chrysanthemum lent towards comfort women while The island of sea women was about friendship among Haenyeo groups during the country’s turbulent times and the need to forgive.
Not only was the story a page turner, but the lives of these unique groups of women along Jeju’s coastline who support their families while the husbands stay home to care for their children was a fascinating background setting.
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