Taiwan Travelogue, written by Taiwanese author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated into English by Lin King, is winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize. It also won the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature in the U.S.
The novel tells the story of Aoyama Chizuko, a Japanese novelist who travels from her hometown Nagasaki to Taiwan in 1938 to experience the life and authentic cuisine in that “Southern Island” as a colony of the Japanese Empire.
Chizuko soon meets her local guide and interpreter Ông Tshian-hóh, or Ō Chizuru in Japanese, whom she nicknames Chi-chan. Together, the pair travels by train and samples a great variety of delicacies across Taiwan, exchanging notes on food, people, literature and culture.
Chizuko becomes increasingly infatuated with Chi-chan, who is knowledgeable, efficient, meticulous and highly capable. However, as much as the Japanese woman wants to befriend her Taiwanese counterpart, she is unable to detect the blind spot in her own perspective – that the power imbalance between the pair will always exist and it is impossible to achieve any true equality between the coloniser and the colonised.
Disguised as a faux translation of a rediscovered Japanese text, the novel comes with a researcher’s preface/introduction and various afterwords by its Chinese and English translators, and even footnotes by Chizuko herself. While this scholarly apparatus adds a sense of “authority” and “authenticity” to the novel, its aim is to interrogate the power dynamics between history and memory, as well as the truths behind any “official” or “grand” narrative.
This is a novel that demands readers to do the work – to observe how the coloniser develops a colony but also exploits and extracts from it, how their attempt to “modernise” that colony’s economy, society, language and culture ends up irrevocably altering the local people’s lives and denying the latter’s rights and dignity to make their own choices.
Worse, the coloniser is unable to see all the harm done to the colonised, as they see themselves as being benevolent and helpful, hence the aforementioned “blind spot”. As described by one of the book’s characters: “There is nothing in the world more difficult to refuse than self-righteous goodwill.”
For those who just want to enjoy the story, it features a delicate yet heart-wrenching romance between two women of distinct intellectual and cultural backgrounds. There are detailed descriptions of social and economic activities and customs across Japanese-occupied Taiwan of the 1930s, as well as breathtaking sceneries and mouth-watering Taiwanese foods. Each dish tells a story of fusion of unique ingredients, flavours and cooking methods, revealing a lesser known aspect of Taiwan as a vibrant multilingual, multicultural and multiethnic society.
Taiwan Travelogue deserves all the hype it gets. Highly recommended.
Note: This book review was originally titled “The lesser known aspect of Taiwan” and published under the title “A lesser known Taiwan” by Ranges Trader Star Mail, August 11, 2026, P.19.
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 