The Gardens of Kyoto

I'm an avid reader, and this book is one of the most beautiful things I've ever had the privilage to read. Both haunting and thoughtful, lyrical and down-to-earth, it manages to paint a heartbreaking story about love; both true love and love at first sight, and how the ramifications of both can affect a person for the rest of their life. The narrator spends the course of the book struggling with her love for her departed cousin and the odd love she feels towards a man who sent her letters throughout World War Two without knowing she was the recipient.The entire story is layed out as if it is being told to the narrator's daughter, and we come to find out that it is the explanation of this young mother's life and why she made the choices that brought her daughter about. Kate Walbert's writing is, in a word, wistful. This is the sort of book that it's painful to reach the end of, because by the last page you feel so deeply connected to the characters you don't want to stop hearing about them. For anyone who read and enjoyed this book, I recommend Walbert's other novel, "Where She Went" -- it is written much in the style of "Gardens", and actually has a few similar plot devices.

I must disagree with the reviewer from Cincinnati. This beautiful novel is one of the best I have read in recent months, although if Cathy was looking for a travel book about Kyoto, she would be disappointed. Kyoto and the gardens are employed as symbols of the life the narrator recounts. The chronology of the novel can be difficult but replicates the way our memories do work--not always in a linear fashion. I think that Walbert has great insight about the often illusory worlds we build for ourselves so that we can keep going. Her writing style is a joy to read.

Rather than reading this book, I may have absorbed it! "The Gardens of Kyoto" is unique in plot and characterization. The tone is almost gothic, with a wonderful sense of place, as Walbert explores the cycle of lost love -- damaged men and the women who love them -- caused by war.Serious and studious Ellen falls in love with her cousin Randall, only son born to an influential judge late in his life. A lonely boy with a passion for vocabulary words, reading encyclopedias and seeing ghosts, Randall reveals his real self to Ellen, trusting her with his secrets. Raised by a woman he later learns is not his mother in a rambling farmhouse once used by the Underground Railroad to harbor escaped slaves, Randall is sent to Okinawa after WWII and dies under circumstances equally as mysterious as the rest of his life. He bequeaths Ellen his private journal and a book about the gardens of Kyoto, Japan. The book figures prominently throughout the story, the book's subject matter a haunting symbol of life.Years later, as a college student, Ellen meets a young soldier, Lt. Henry Rock. Henry falls for Ellen's troubled and indifferent friend, Daphne, and begins a correspondence. Intending the letters for Daphne, Ellen is the one who receives them and falls in love with the writer. After the war, Henry finds Ellen and begins an ill-fated relationship.The book spans the 1940's and 1950's, through World War II and the Korean War. In the book, the men who survive the wars, Roger, Ellen's brother-in-law, and Henry are "damaged", so affected by their experience that they are changed forever, unreachable by those who love them.Chapter 11 of book 5 quotes Iago, "'I am not what I am ....' We are none of us who we are." This paragraph flew out at me as soon as I read it. Everyone hides his private demons from public view. A wonderful summation of the novel.This is a starkly written novel, and perhaps it is this starkness that provokes the emotions. As I read this, I truly did hurt for Ellen and her losses. I felt Randall's isolation, Henry's disillusionment, Daphne's self-destructiveness. The minor character's, such as Randall's birth mother, Ruby, and Ellen's sisters, Rita and Betty, made brief appearances, but left big impressions. The writing and even the dust jacket are sepia-toned, but the story is so emotionally colorful that it is hard to walk away from it.

Like the meditation gardens in Kyoto, Japan, which is the underlying metaphor to the book (in case you couldn't guess), the story of Ellen is told with subtlety and hidden shades of meaning, which the reader is invited to visit and probe. Ellen is presumably narrating her story to her daughter. The defining event in Ellen's life is the early, barely realized love and loss of her cousin Randall, who was killed in World War II on Iwo Jima in the Pacific. It will tragically affect and color her other relationships forever, although how, is not fully revealed to the reader immediately, but discovered along the way. While Ellen is the central character, it soon becomes apparent, through other of the book's characters, that the author has a broader message in mind than Ellen's private sorrow. Slowly, we learn how war affects and sometimes ruins the people it touches.Randall ironically has a love of Japanese culture, particularly the treasured book Gardens of Kyoto, which he bequeathes to Ellen along with his diary. It is the first of many ironies which we are invited to discover, observe, and puzzle out, including glimpses of relationships rather than the relationships themselves. With deft strokes, Kate Walbert gives us just enough information to do just that, painting her landscape and weaving her story through flashbacks and flash forwards, often in a surreal or dreamlike fashion. At times one starts to lose a sense of time and place, reality and fantasy, although Walbert always manages to bring us back. As layers of secrets unfurl, the story keeps drawing us up until the very end.This is an accomplished first novel, at first impression deceptively simple, but leaving the reader with remembrances of lingering sadness and loss long after it is finished.

Every once in a while, a book comes along that is so stirring in its message and so elegant in its composition that you cannot wait to tell everyone you know about it. This is one of those books. Like the real gardens of Kyoto, it is quiet, subtle, and cerebral. At the same time, it is immensely powerful in effect, full of dramatic contrasts which illuminate the bedrock of life itself. The mood is contemplative and introspective, and the reader ultimately gains new insights into the nature of human relationships. The main character, Ellen, is a young girl during the early 1940's, fascinated by her cousin Randall, a slight, sensitive boy, a few years older, that she sees only once or twice a year. Randall expands Ellen's view of the world, showing her secret rooms in his house and inviting her to share some of his intellectual curiosity about the Underground Railroad which once stopped there. The voices of these young people, each alone in many ways, speak directly to the reader and involve him/her in both the action and the values of the times. Ellen shares Randall's fear as he leaves for the World War II, where, we have discovered in the opening sentence, he is killed on Iwo Jima. He leaves Ellen a box of "treasures," including his diary and his copy of The Gardens of Kyoto, a book given to him by his mother. As the diary and book reveal Randall's family history, we also learn about Ellen's family, the relationships of the parents, their relationships with each other, Ellen's relationships with each of them, and her relationship with the father of the child to whom she is leaving the written record which constitutes this novel. The plot is full and rich with many overlaps of time and detail as the narrative shifts from pre-World War II to Korea. The main characters are fully developed, understandable people trying to adapt to their changing world the best way they can, some more successfully than others. However fascinating the story is (and it is totally captivating), Walbert's underlying themes and their development are even more fascinating (or were to me). She illustrates, among other things, that as in Kyoto's gardens, our views of "truth" are limited by our vantage points, that we sometimes confuse shadow with reality, and that there is a universal desire among all men to find peace and serenity. This is a remarkable novel, satisfying on every level, a total pleasure to read, with insights into so many aspects of life that you will be thinking about it long after you have finished reading. Mary Whipple