Taiwan Travelogue opens, almost prophetically, with a misunderstanding, the easiest of the many misunderstandings that await its two protagonists. Aoyama Chizuko, a celebrated Japanese novelist on a government-sponsored lecture tour in Taiwan, deliberately strays into a bustling market instead of waiting at the station where she is meant to be picked up. Curious and impulsive, she ends up bickering with a teenage vendor whose language she cannot understand. Into this fracas steps a young Taiwanese woman who translates a few sentences, settles the confusion, and disappears almost as quickly as she arrived. Aoyama will spend the rest of the novel trying to close the distance that opens up in that moment.

First published in Mandarin in 2020, Yáng Shuāng-z’s debut novel, translated into English by Lin King, won this year’s International Booker Prize. The novel’s creative structure resembles a Borgesian puzzle, with its invented authors, imaginary texts, and literary sleights of hand that turn the reading experience into a game of interpretation. Taiwan Travelogue presents itself as a Japanese work written in 1954 by the fictional Aoyama Chizuko and later “translated” into Mandarin by Yáng, who is, of course, its actual author. The original Mandarin edition went so far as to credit Aoyama as the author and Yáng as the translator.

But the illusion extends far beyond the title page. An introduction, translator’s note, afterword, and other paratextual elements encourage readers to believe that Aoyama and her work actually exist, dissolving the boundary between fiction and literary history.

Set during the final decade of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan, the novel follows Aoyama and her Taiwanese interpreter, Ông Tshian-hóh—better known by her Japanese name Ō Chizuru and affectionately called Chi-chan by Aoyama—over the course of 1938 as the novelist pursues what she calls an “authentic island experience”. By filtering Taiwan through the perspective of a Japanese and her relationship with a Taiwanese, Yáng foregrounds the colonial dynamics that shape who manages to get heard, to document history, and decide the narrative.

An interesting feature of the “travelogue” is its chapter titles, which are names of dishes: roasted seeds, jute soup, sashimi, curry, potato noodle stew, etc. Food is the lens through which Aoyama understands Taiwan as well as how the novel gauges the limits of that understanding. Her recurring query is: “Is there something good to eat around here?” Aoyama is nearly always thinking about food, even when Chi-chan is getting publicly humiliated by a school official. “You know what the best cure for anger is? Food!” she declares. Food is how she expresses her affection for Taiwan—enthusiastically, and entirely on her own terms—without ever understanding the people who made it or the politics that surround it.

Degrees of constraint

Chi-chan is a carefully constructed character. The daughter of a concubine, raised in poverty and mentored by three gē-tòa (female entertainers comparable to the Japanese geisha) who secure her education so that she does not go her mother’s way, Chi-chan learns early how to navigate the world. Her flawless Japanese, her skill at dice games, and her ability to answer every question while revealing almost nothing about herself are not so much personality traits as a way of self-preservation.

Aoyama recognises this instinct for what it is, although she cannot see through Chi-chan’s armour to detect what she is protecting herself from. Late in the novel Aoyama remarks: “I have long been aware that you have another side to you that is secretive, unforthcoming, and perfectly capable of lying with a straight face—a masterful actor. It is this masterful actor whom I regard as my best friend.” It is the most perceptive thing she says. It is also an admission that what she loves the most in Chi-chan is precisely what she can never reach.

Aoyama’s freedom to wander, observe, and consume is genuine, but it is sustained by Chi-chan’s largely invisible labour. Aoyama gets time to write because Chi-chan quietly organises her scattered notes, restocks her larder with jellies and red bean buns, and rustles up whichever dish she happens to crave. When Aoyama falls sick and makes extravagant requests for food from her bed, Chi-chan makes six successive bowls of noodles, each with a different recipe and more elaborate than the last. The novel Aoyama completes in Taiwan, the very book we are reading, rests on this foundation of care and service.

Chi-chan’s own ambition is to become a literary translator. Aoyama is delighted when she learns this and promptly proposes that Chi-chan move to Kyūshū and work as her translator. Aoyama is well-meaning but without the imaginative depth to realise that Chi-chan’s vision of her own future and her vision of Chi-chan’s future might not be the same. Aoyama rails against Chi-chan’s impending marriage without understanding the conditions that led to the decision. Although both of them are constrained as women in a man’s world, they are not constrained in the same way.

Aoyama’s moment of reckoning arrives roughly three-quarters into the novel, during a conversation with Mishima Aizō, the Government General assigned to escort her. As a wānshēng—a Japanese born in Taiwan, belonging to neither world completely—Mishima occupies a vantage point from which he can see the contradictions that escape Aoyama. Unlike Chi-chan, he is also able to speak to her with a degree of frankness that the unequal relationship between Aoyama and her interpreter does not permit.

When Aoyama praises the Japanese Empire’s “development” of Taiwan, arguing that however brutal the process might may have been, it also brought about undeniable benefits, Mishima rebukes her immediately: “… the way in which you talk about the Island’s flavors does not sound to me like you are appreciating them for being delicious, but more for being exotic, as one might appreciate a rare animal.”

No easy solution

He points to the centuries-old Taichū Maso Temple, demolished overnight in the name of urban planning. He notes that while the fishing industry may have become more efficient, nobody asked whether local communities wanted to abandon their traditional methods or examined the ways in which the change altered their culinary lifestyle. The final point in his argument is an eye-opener for Aoyama: “The so-called wonderful things are only wonderful to Mainlanders, and more specifically, they are only wonderful to you.”

By this point, the parallel is unmistakable. Aoyama’s attitude towards Taiwan and Chi-chan is much the same: she engages with both on her own terms, celebrating what they give her while looking away from the costs of these pleasures.

Yáng does not offer an easy resolution. Mishima, too, is implicated; he is part of the system he critiques. Taiwan in 1938 was marked by overlapping hierarchies, and the novel’s intelligence lies in keeping the tensions between those layers intact instead of passing a single moral verdict. At times, however, the strain of holding everything together shows, producing passages that read like infodumps. But this is a minor flaw that does not affect the reading experience of this ambitious novel.

In the end, Taiwan Travelogue does answer the question it sets for itself: “Can Aoyama Chizuko and Ông Tshian-hóh really be called friends?” After a long silence following their final quarrel, the two women meet once again on a bridge over the Midori river, sharing a bowl of fruit and jelly ice. In two weeks, Aoyama will return to Japan, and their year together will fade into memory. For now, the image of that bowl of fruit and jelly ice lingers, perfect in its sweetness.

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