WINNER OF THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE
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. Shes 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 womanwho is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her nameis hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizukos 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. Its 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 Taiwans highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.
