More Than Yuri─Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel

I just finished reading Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel, a work that has won multiple book awards, with its fictionalized story of creation being no less fascinating than the contents of the novel. Published in 2024, it was an English translation, as I usually read, but it was unusual because the original novel, published in 2020, was written in Mandarin Chinese, which, alongside Taiwanese Hokkien, is my first language. To confuse─or rather, amaze (for those who have read it)─readers even more, the 2020 novel claims to be based on a series of earlier works tracing their origins to a Japanese novel with the same name, published in 1954. 

Set in 1938 Taiwan, my native land, which was then part of the Japanese Empire, the novel opens with Aoyama Chizuko, a young novelist who 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 whose name shares characters with hers─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. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It's only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the "something" is, as expressed in a famous quote in the novel: "There is nothing in the world more difficult to refuse than self-righteous goodwill."

Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered Japanese text, Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships. The novel first won the Golden Tripod Award─the highest honor in Taiwan’s publishing industry─in 2021, with its Japanese translation later winning Japan's Best Translation Award in June 2024. Five months later, its English translation received the prestigious National Book Award for Translated Literature in the USA. It was the first time a Taiwanese novel had won either award.

The jury praised that it was "a masterful novel that combines a sly literary conceit with the lush pleasures of food writing, upended by a deepening experience of colonialism and its effects on friendship and love". They praised Yang Shuang-zi's "narrative gifts" for revealing layers behind the apparent travelogue and translator Lin King for her "artful translation" that "allows tension to swell beneath the surface". It is a bittersweet narrative of the bond between two women, nestled in an exploration of language, cuisine, history and power, as amusingly outlined by the Taiwanese cousine as the titles of its twelve chapters.

I love the Taiwan map provided in the book, which was marked with pronunciations in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and English, just as the translator meticulously did for the texts, even extending to the use of Hokkien and Hakka, the two major Taiwanese languages. No wonder this novel is also known as a story about translators, and all the artful translation did make my reading experience more heartwarming and enjoyable.

Also included in the novel are sketches of the Yana River cottage by Aoyama Chizuko, the main character of the novel. The cottage was the residence of Aoyama during her twelve-month stay in Taiwan. These sketches allowed me to imagine her already well-depicted life in Taiwan even more vividly.

One of the sketches explains the layout of the cottage in both Japanese and English, which is both informative and interesting to me. I found it interesting because although Japanese Kanji looks similar to the Chinese characters we use in Mandarin Chinese, they often have different meanings. To this end, I understand it better through English rather than Japanese, which I know very little about.

Apart from the novel itself, the introduction, afterwords, and various notes in the appendix─all fictionalized─are crucial and indispensable in piecing together the whole picture of the story, which was intended as a work of metafiction, as well as a work of Yuri─a genre of Japanese media focusing on intimate relationships between female characters. As such, I feel compelled to simply quote some passages from them in this post.

Here's "Introduction", written by Hiyoshi Sagako, a scholar who kept the Japanese original of Taiwan Travelogue by Aoyama Chizuko:

「Interestingly, I did not learn until the Taiwanese publisher asked me to write an introduction that the museum staff had described me to Ms. Yáng as a "Japanese scholar." When I heard this, I did not know whether to feel amused or offended. The word that I would use to describe myself, 灣生, is pronounced wanshẽng in Mandarin Chinese, wansei in Japanese, and uan-sing in Taiwanese Hokkien. Being catalogued as simply "Japanese" seemed to exclude me from Taiwan entirely. However, perhaps my unusual origins make me unusually suited to introduce this novel to contemporary readers.

The term wansheng originated when Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule, and its meaning is exactly what the Han characters imply: Japanese people born in Taiwan. By blood, we belonged to the great Yamato race, but as Japanese citizens we were "subpar"; growing up on the subtropical island, our use of the national language, Japanese, was often nonstandard, and few of us had ever seen snow or truly experienced the four seasons. Even if our bloodIines were "pure, many Japanese argued that we could not possibly possess the true "spirit" of the Japanese People. Thus, the wanshẽng were often regarded as inferior.」

"Memories of my Mother" by Aoyama Yoko, artist and adopted daughter of Aoyama Chizuko:

「The novel Taiwan Travelogue was published in Showa Year 29 (1954). After its publication, Mother went around asking her acquaintances from far and wide to take a copy of the book to Taiwan. She spent year after year asking people to mail or take copies with them, but nothing ever came of this. When I was at junior college, the remaining copies of Taiwan Travelogue were destroyed in a windstorm, leaving the novel officially out of print. It was only then that Mother ceased her attempts at fulfilling her wish.

As young as I was, I could easily guess that book's hoped-for destination was Chi-chan.」

"Noodles" by Wang Chien-ho, another main character called Chi-chan by Aoyama Chizuko in the novel:

「Before I knew it, thirty years had passed since the day of those noodles at the Yana River cottage. Fleeting light, fleeting light, I beg thee drink this cup of wine. It makes sense that this poem is now on my lips. If one day we are to meet in heaven, Aoyama-san, on behalf of all the wine that we could not share in our lives, I will again raise my cup to you.」

"A Promise of the Departed" by Wang Cheng-mei, literary scholar and daughter of Wang Chien-ho:

「The Chiăng Chĩng-kuó government announced an end to Taiwan's martial law in the summer of 1987. One sweltering afternoon, my mother called me at the university from her home in

Austin and expressed her wish to translate My Taiwan Travelogue with Tshian-hoh into Mandarin and to have it published in Taiwan. My mother was seventy at this time; the translation of a longform novel was a hefty undertaking, and she'd called me to request my assistance out of the fear that her health would not be able to sustain a project of such scale. However, I was a full-time professor at the time and was struggling with my own workload.

I asked Mother: Why translate into Mandarin? And why publish in Taiwan?

She said, "It is a promise I have with the departed."」

"Amber" by Yang Shuang-zi, author of Taiwan Travelogue published in 2020:

「The story of the new Mandarin Chinese edition of Taiwan Travelogue begins at the end of 2014. My late elder sister and I had taken a brief trip to Kitakyūshū in Japan, also traveling through Fukuoka, Moji, Kumamoto, and Yufuin, among other places in the region. There, we visited the Hayashi Fumiko Memorial Reference Room located in the historical building of the Former Moji Mitsui Club. The exhibits showcased many of the letters between the feminist writer Hayashi Fumiko and her contemporaries, including famous Japanese writers such as Yoshiya Nobuko and Kawabata Yasunari. My sister does not understand Japanese, so I paraphrased everything for her in Mandarin under my breath. But, when I saw a postcard from a certain Aoyama Chizuko, I cried out, "Someone once wrote a book called Taiwan Travelogue!"」

「As I prepare to lay down my pen, the thought that seizes my heart is: this book can very much be described as our piece of amber.」

Notes by Ling King, Translator of Taiwan Travelogue, 2024 Edition 
 

「Lastly, I would also like to thank Miura Yūko, the Japanese translator of Taiwan Travelogue. Her translation, published by Chüoköron-Shinsha in 2023, was of great help to me for fact-checking my Japanese transliterations of names and places. Surely Aoyama and Chi-chan would be tickled by this: a Taiwanese translator, while bringing the book to the ultimate colonial language of English, has struggled to determine how the Japanese colonial government would have pronounced Taiwanese terms and therefore consulted the Japanese translation of a Taiwanese novel that claims to be a Taiwanese translation of a Japanese novel. Oh dear oh dear oh dear!」