Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel

By Yáng Shuang-zi

Translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King

Tags: Lesbian, POC and Queer, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Romance

A bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history, and power.

Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature

May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.
 
Soon a Taiwanese woman—who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name—is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It’s only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the “something” is.
 
Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.

“Beginning in a world as solid and stately as Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’sThe Makioka Sisters, this wise and wily novel deftly takes the reader down a rabbit hole as filled with longing and misunderstanding as Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch.”—Marie Mutsuki Mockett

“Yáng Shuang-zi's writing is sweet and delicious on the surface, only to reveal it has real bite. There isn't a single sentence in this powerful metafictional journey through food, language, relationships, and translation that doesn't carry the weight of history.”—Bruna Dantas Lobato

“A (fictional) Japanese writer explores the colorful and complex culinary, linguistic, and political dynamics that shaped life in 1930s Taiwan. . . . A moving account of friendship in the shadow of the Japanese Southern Expansion policy.”—Kirkus

“Yáng offers rich reflections on colonialism and translation along with delightful depictions of Taiwanese delicacies.”—Publishers Weekly