By The European Times | Created at 2026-09-06 11:21:36 | Updated at 2026-09-27 00:16:55
2 weeks ago
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ turns food, translation and thwarted intimacy into a subtle study of colonial rule
Taiwan Travelogue, translated into English by Lin King, is a beguiling historical novel whose abundant meals conceal a sterner inquiry into empire. Through the relationship between a Japanese writer and her Taiwanese interpreter, Yáng Shuāng-zǐ shows how affection can be genuine while remaining distorted by privilege, class and political power.
In May 1938, the young novelist Aoyama Chizuko arrives in Taiwan, then governed as a Japanese colony. Officially, she has been invited to participate in a government-sponsored cultural tour. Her own ambitions are less dutiful: she wants to escape ceremonial banquets, encounter the island beyond imperial staging and sample everything its kitchens can offer.
Her guide is Ō Chizuru, a highly educated Taiwanese interpreter whose linguistic skill, composure and culinary knowledge quickly fascinate her visitor. Chizuko treats their shared names and literary interests as evidence of an instinctive equality. Chizuru understands that equality cannot simply be declared into existence. She is an employee, a colonial subject and a woman facing expectations that her comparatively independent guest can more easily resist.
An Appetite With Consequences
Food supplies the novel’s most immediate pleasures. Trains, markets and dining tables bring dish after dish into view, rendered with close attention to preparation, texture and regional history. The humour of Chizuko’s enormous appetite keeps the narrative buoyant; an authorised English extract captures both her comic exuberance and her dependence on Chizuru’s patient mediation.
Yet eating is never politically innocent here. Chizuko wants “authentic” Taiwan, but authenticity is itself conditioned by migration, poverty, trade and successive rulers. Her enthusiasm risks turning the island into something available for a sophisticated traveller to consume. The meals she receives also depend upon Chizuru’s labour, knowledge and accommodation, much of which the narrator initially treats as effortless hospitality.
This is one of Yáng’s sharpest achievements. Chizuko is neither a crude imperialist nor a simple emblem of Japanese domination. She objects to the official colonial agenda and believes herself unusually open-minded. Her blind spot is more unsettling precisely because her intentions are often warm. She can recognise injustice in the abstract while failing to see how her demands reproduce it in private.
The Distance Between Two Women
The developing attachment between Chizuko and Chizuru gives these political questions emotional force. Their conversations move between banter, shared reading and guarded confession. Desire is present, but rarely secure enough to name. Chizuko’s increasing infatuation collides with Chizuru’s obligations, social position and prospective marriage.
Because the story remains close to Chizuko’s perspective, Chizuru can sometimes appear frustratingly opaque. That restriction has a clear purpose: readers experience the limits of a coloniser’s knowledge through a narrator who mistakes access for understanding. Nevertheless, the device carries a cost. Chizuru’s silences occasionally make her seem more like the keeper of the novel’s moral truth than a fully available consciousness.
The imbalance is productive rather than accidental. Chizuko has the freedom to be candid because the consequences of candour are lighter for her. Chizuru must calculate what can be said, in which language and to whom. The resulting romance is persuasive not as an escape from history, but as an account of how history enters the smallest gestures between people.
A Translation That Never Stands Still
The novel’s boldest feature is its invented publishing history. Taiwan Travelogue presents itself as the translation of a rediscovered Japanese memoir, accompanied by introductions, footnotes and afterwords that complicate the status of what readers have just encountered. The apparent documentary scaffolding is part of the fiction.
Lin King’s English version adds another genuine interpretive layer. Japanese, Mandarin and Taiwanese Hokkien cannot be transferred into English as interchangeable markers. King differentiates languages and pronunciations through romanisation and diacritics, while her notes coexist with those belonging to the book’s fictional editorial apparatus. A detailed account in Words Without Borders illuminates the care behind these choices.
The accumulation can be demanding. Readers who prefer a swift, uninterrupted narrative may find the paratext disproportionate, especially when the emotional story is at its most compelling. But the interruptions are not decorative cleverness. They demonstrate how histories are transmitted through institutions, translators and later political assumptions. Every edition promises recovery while inevitably changing what it carries.
Beyond the Prize
The novel was first published in Taiwanese Mandarin in 2020. The UK edition appeared through And Other Stories in March 2026 and subsequently won the 2026 International Booker Prize, following the English translation’s earlier National Book Award success in the United States.
Those honours may encourage readers to approach the book chiefly as a significant work of postcolonial literature. It is that, but the label should not obscure its wit, sensuousness or emotional uncertainty. Nor should contemporary geopolitical concern reduce Taiwan to another object viewed through the priorities of larger powers. Yáng’s novel insists on the island as a place of languages, memories, appetites and contested identities that cannot be contained by an outsider’s strategic map.
Taiwan Travelogue is strongest when its formal ingenuity and intimate drama work together. Its food writing invites pleasure, then asks who prepared the feast and who had the freedom to enjoy it without fear. Its romance offers connection without pretending that affection can abolish unequal conditions. The result is playful, exacting and quietly painful: a novel about the human desire to know another person, and the humility required to recognise what remains beyond one’s reach.
Editorial disclosure: This assessment is based on the publisher-authorised English extract, official publication material and independently published critical discussion rather than access to the complete volume.
