Through Thickets of Memories: On Reading Amber Logan’s The Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn
Amber Logan’s impressive debut novel The Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn invites readers into a lushly landscaped world of beauty, loss, and surprising discoveries. The novel, written in an elegantly sparse style, follows American Marissa Lennox to her childhood home in Japan, where her commission to photograph a venerable but declining inn outside Kyoto, allows her to confront her own grief and frayed memories. As I journeyed alongside Marissa (or Mari as she is known in the story) I found myself transported back to my own childhood, leading me to past readings, forgotten memories, and a new view of the present.
When I was seven, my family spent a year in India. I’m sixty-eight now, so the memories of those days are fragmented and come to me in sparks of colors and wisps of fragrances. One memory I do have is of my older sisters reading to me. Our mother must have assigned them to the task as a way to keep me entertained and out of trouble. (As a child, I delighted in getting into trouble!) We read Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories and Johanna Spyri’s Heidi. I’m pretty sure my sister Judy sat me down for an oration of the Ancient Mariner; and Beth read to me from Jane Eyre. But the reading that was dearest from that year was Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.
I can’t remember very much of the story now. It blurs together with elephants, red rooms, and Swiss alps. What comes to me when I try to recall the story is enchantment. The story opened new passageways in my imagination and new spaces where hidden gardens became portals into mystery, beauty, and healing.
Amber Logan, in her Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn, captures exactly this mélange of enthrallment. The parallels with Burnett’s 1911 children’s classic are notable. Logan’s protagonist, Marissa Lennox, is an obvious nod to Burnett’s Mary Lennox. She is newly orphaned like her earlier referent, but unlike Burnett’s spoiled Mary, Mari is not a child of wealth. Moreover, Mari is an adult.
An unmarried woman in her thirties with the thinnest of careers managing an art gallery, Mari’s world comes crashing down when her mother dies of cancer. After securing a grant with an art program, Mari returns to her childhood home in Kyoto with the assignment of photographing the once resplendent Yanagi Inn on the outskirts of the old Japanese capital. Once there, caught between the fog of jet lag and an uncanny sense of déjà vu, Mari realizes she has spent time at the inn before. But when? While walking through the inn’s tangled gardens, looking for scenes to photograph, she discovers a lone crane, who leads her to an abandoned island. Although Mari is told in no uncertain terms she is not to venture out to the island, she cannot contain herself. A powerful, unnamed force draws her there, where she will eventually discover the truths about her past.
In Burnett’s novel, Mary Lennox is shipped off to a crumbling manor on the Yorkshire Moors and placed under the care of a crotchety uncle, related to her only by marriage. Here she finds friendship with the gardener, the maid, and the maid’s younger brother, a robust lad who spends his days exploring the moors. At night, disturbed by the sound of crying, Mary wends her way through the dark and drafty manor in pursuit of the whimpers, eventually to discover in a hidden room, Colin, her uncle’s sickly son.
The manor holds other secrets as well; Mary learns of a garden, walled off from the main grounds and left abandoned. It had once been the refuge of Mary’s aunt but upon her death had been placed under lock and key. Unable to contain her curiosity, Mary feels compelled to make her way into the garden, guided by a friendly robin, and then to work secretly with her new friends to restore it. In the process, she is healed of her loneliness, her cousin, Colin, returns to health, and her morose uncle regains his heart.
Logan’s novel proceeds in a similar vein. Her Mari is still in the throes of grief when she lands at the ramshackle Yanagi Inn. She is monitored by an irritable innkeeper, befriended by a chambermaid, and guided by a wise Buddhist nun. Along the way, Mari encounters an elegant heron and a wily tanuki. Her nights are disturbed by mysterious sobbing, and her days are tantalized by the abandoned island, which she and the nun decide to secretly restore.
While Logan’s novel derives inspiration from Burnett’s, it is by no means merely a retelling. Logan’s tale is darkly psychological, slipping into surreal and ghostly flights of fantasy. Readers of Burnett’s work (especially those who like me are decades from their initial reading) will be enticed by a pleasant but at times unnerving sense of familiarity. We feel we’ve been in the story before but can’t quite remember where we entered. Delightfully, our confusion is paralleled by Mari’s own, who wills herself to remember but finds her memories only “itch” on the edge of her consciousness.
I idly picked up a thick stick from the ground, stirred up the dark bottom of the basin, turning the water into a gray sludge. The activity felt familiar, setting off long-unused synapses in my brain as if I’d done it before. I kept swirling, a witch stirring her cauldron, staring into its depths to revive the sensation again. But the image was gone, the moment lost.
Going forward in the story, Mari pieces together the memories that slowly surface from the murky pool of her subconscious. And, like the cauldron in the image above, a dark ominousness hovers around this remembering. What might be lurking in the past?
Although Mari had lived for some time in Japan as a child, the clarity of the past has been dulled by time and perhaps by a forgotten trauma. Small things spark nostalgia. Rice balls, origami cranes, the cries of the cicadas. Memories return to Mari unbidden and out of sequence. Cicadas drone in the background of her waking hours like an eerie movie score—impossibly out of place. The story is set in the chill of early spring, long before cicadas emerge. How could Mari hear them, she wonders?
Their presence signals a second narrative layer in the story. We travel with Mari through the unkempt garden in real time while simultaneously we accompany her into interstitial time, into the reality that exists between memories. For me, this is the magic of Logan’s novel. It allows readers to slip through crevices in the narrative present and to explore these hidden worlds of imagination with Mari.
To this end, Mari’s calling as a photographer is appropriate. Photographs offers tactical evidence of the multidimensionality of time. In a photograph, time is arrested and stories of the past are frozen in ways that calcify them in memory. Mari has lost contact with these frozen stories from her own past because her mother destroyed all her childhood photographs. This loss pushes Mari to reconstruct mental snapshots of her lost past. Moreover, the photographs that Mari produces of the ruined gardens become new narratives of the present, as Mari sees in her digital captures that which had not been visible to her at first glance. New worlds bloom on her computer screen when she uploads her images.
The garden itself takes on richly metaphorical meaning in the novel making it more than a botanical space. The garden represents the power of human consciousness to thrive and grow in different places at once. Mari seeks to restore the “secret garden” of the forbidden island, while at the same time she explores and rejuvenates her own locked and abandoned mental resources.
A magical place, the Yanagi Inn garden becomes a refuge for the wounded. Notably, all the wounded are women. The nun, Honda, who labors quietly to keep chaos at bay, the crane who builds her nest on the island, even the tanuki, Goro—mistakenly gendered male—all are female. There is no male savior. In fact, there are hardly any men in the novel at all. There are a few who exist on the edge of the page—Mari’s father, her ex-boyfriend Thad, and Honda’s boat-builder friend. But, their roles in the story are inconsequential. This is a woman-centered novel. And it is through the labor of two women—Mari and Honda—working to benefit other women that the Yanagi Inn island garden is restored.
We are never told precisely where Yanagi Inn is, other than that it is close to Kyoto. It is unmarked by geographic detail. It is a Japanese space—with tatami and Jizo-san statues—but it is also beyond specificity, making it free to float in the reader’s imagination. It drifts among the moors of England, the bungalows of India, and the mountains of Japan in this reader’s imagination. And, as a result, Mari’s quest for the truth, her pursuit of memories becomes my own. With every corner the protagonist turned chasing her past, so did I. The novel led me back to my seventh year and returned me to the wonder of gardens and the thrill of new discovery.
The Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn. CamCat Books (November 15, 2022).
About the Author:
Amber Logan is a university instructor, freelance editor, and author of speculative fiction living in Kansas with her husband and two children—Fox and Willow. In addition to her degrees in Psychology, Liberal Arts, and International Relations, Amber holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.
When she’s not writing, Amber enjoys trips to Japan, exploring unusual vegetarian foods, and reading Haruki Murakami.
Check out this YouTube link for a fascinating interview with Amber about The Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn.
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