Book Review: The Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn by Amber Logan
A reimagining of the classic tale set in a ryokan in Kyoto
After the death of her mother from cancer, photographer Mari Lennox accepts a grant to document for posterity’s sake an old isolated ryokan somewhere outside of Kyoto.
Mari had grown up in Yokohama, the daughter of an ex-pat executive but returned to Chicago with her mother when she was 10 years old. Though an American, she is able to speak Japanese.
When she arrives at the ryokan, she finds a badly faded facility.
The façade was so forsaken, and so vastly different from the grand entranceway I had envisioned, that I began to wonder whether there’d been a mistake. But then I saw it — a battered wooden sign hanging by the front doors, carved with the name “Yanagi Inn,” and my stomach sank. I was in the right place.
The ryokan appears to have no other guests, only a strict innkeeper who orders Mari to follow the rules, a vivacious manga-loving teenage girl who delivers meals to Mari’s room, and an elderly nun who lives in a Buddhist temple behind the inn’s expansive but dilapidated gardens.
As Mari explores the grounds, she spends her time in the once exquisite gardens that have been left to grow wild. Yanagi Inn is named…
