Taiwan Travelogue

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

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 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 honour, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.

With sumptuous food writing, laugh-out-loud dialogue, and metafictional twists, this novel was impossible to put down. Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double act—it succeeds as both a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial novel. - International Booker Prize judges

A nesting-doll narrative about colonial power in its many forms ... Taiwan Travelogue, first published in Mandarin Chinese in 2020, is a delightfully slippery novel about how power shapes relationships, and what travel reveals and conceals ... There are multiple afterwords and many footnotes from both fictional and real translators. It all amounts to a virtuosic performance of literary polyphony. - Shahnaz Habib, The New York Times Book Review

Yang has structured her novel like a matryoshka doll—a straightforward story surrounded by many twisting layers of mystery. - The Atlantic