This essay examines the obscured history of Zen as an ideology of Japanese imperialism in Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists. It contends that the novel silently draws on this history as a narrative device to subvert readings that overlook both its mobilization of Zen and the fact that Zen, as it is popularly understood today by a majority of scholars and theologians, has been distorted by Western orientalists and Japanese apologists since the turn of the twentieth century. The essay makes a case for the need for readers to account for this obscured history precisely because it exerts overdetermining force on the protagonist's understanding of her experiences of the historical events that shaped her.