The Gift of Rain (2008) By Tan Twan Eng

The cover of The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng includes a review blurb calling it "Glorious," praise so over-the-top it nearly prevented me from buying the book.  If a book needs such intense marketing, I figured, there must be something terribly wrong with it.  Fortunately, I purchased the book anyway.  It now joins James Baldwin's Another Country and John Steinbeck's classic The Grapes of Wrath on the list of the best books I've ever read -- all the more amazing when one realizes it is Mr. Eng's first book.  Praise indeed.

One might categorize The Gift of Rain as a war narrative, though forcing it into that genre does not begin to explain its impact.  Yes, World War II underlies everything in this book, yet the individual relationships in the story are what make it “glorious.”

The tale Mr. Eng tells is set in Penang, a large island off the northwest coast of Malaysia, and covers the time period of 1939 through the end of World War II.  The story is told to a Japanese woman who has come to Penang some fifty years later in an attempt to find answers about a Japanese diplomat/soldier's final years.  His story is told to her over a period of weeks by a now elderly man named Philip Hutton. 

Hutton is a native of Malaysia, born to a British colonial industrialist and his Chinese immigrant wife. When he was a sixteen year old boy he met the woman’s friend, named Hayato Endo, known as Endo-san.  Hutton’s father had rented Endo-san a small island near the family mansion, not realizing he had been sent to Penang to begin exploring the Malay Peninsula in advance of the Japanese invasion of the country.

The younger Hutton soon becomes a pupil of Aikijutso, with Endo-san serving as his sensei, or tutor/mentor.  This is a subplot that plays a key role in the book, preparing him mentally and physically to be able to navigate the occupation.  The relationship between these two characters survives through a horrific backdrop of war, when little else does.

For an American, or even a Britain (Malaysia was a British colony before and again after the war), this is a version of the war we seldom read – Pearl Harbor is mentioned once, because it occurred the same day the Japanese invasion of Malaysia began, and the Americans are not mentioned again until the news of Hiroshima is announced over Radio-India.  Yet, if one is a war history buff, the Bridge over the River Kwai history is alluded to several times, as Malay prisoners of war, including Hutton’s brother, are sent as forced labor to construct a rail line to China; and there are heart wrenching reports on the Rape of Nanking and other atrocities on the Chinese mainland. 

Late last year, Tan Twan Eng published his second book, The Garden of Evening Mists.  To say the least, it has been added to my summer reading list ... with great anticipation.