 The portions of the book that follow the character Emiko Amai is written as a first-person narrative, while the portions following Sophie and Anton Böll use the third-person. The tone was described as "disturbingly calm". Its central theme is that of identity and attempts to find solace. Bock states "All three of the main characters in The Ash Garden are refugees who don 't belong anywhere. Each has a desperate search for home." In Harper's Magazine, Pico Iyer compares The Ash Garden with Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient as "a book that ends where Bock's begins". An essay in the journal Canadian Ethnic Studies, looked at The Ash Garden from the a Japanese historical perspective, finding strong similarities between the real-life Hiroshima Maiden Shigeko and the character Emiko, but noting it was not a roman à clef.
