Author: Yang Shuang-zi (楊双子) (trans. Lin Kang)

Format: E-Book

Taiwan Travelogue is an account of a year long trip to Taiwan taken by Aoyama Chizuko, a Japanese author, during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan (specifically, during the 1930s), and her relationship with her Taiwanese interpreter, Chizuru (“Chi”). Each chapter centres around a food item that Chi manages to acqure for Aoyama’s “monstrous” appetite as she arranges Aoyama’s travels around the island for talks, etc. As expected, the novel plays with Aoyama’s budding crush on Chizuru and the tension between them developing a true friend / more than friendship and the inherent power dynamic imposed by Aoyama’s role as a colonizer.

Overall, I enjoyed the novel - the romantic tension is built up well, especially as Aoyama desperately struggles to figure out why Chi continually keeps her distance, but is simply unable to. This isn’t to say that she is a imperialist warmonger; rather, she repeatedly expresses her distaste of the “Southern Expansion” program and attempts to acknowledge the power imbalance, but even then cannot completely separate herself from her internal biases etc. I found this aspect of her character quite well done, even if towards the end it got a bit repetitive to the point that Aoyama begins to come off as just kind of an idiot (surely at some point she would’ve realized at least a little…).

The framing of food is cute and helps highlight some of the core themes of the novel (providing a role for Chi to continually serve in as Aoyama’s cook / chief restaurant-acquirer / Aoyama’s fetishization of the ‘real’ Taiwan), but there’s just soooo much food description that it’s honestly unnecessary. I don’t know that I needed like a full literal quarter of every chapter to be spent on food / restaurant descriptions tbh.

Also, there’s a like triply nested translation conceit going on here - Aoyama writes the ‘‘original’’ novel, which is later translated by Chi, then edited by Chi’s daughter into an abridged version (maybe she cut out the gratuitous food descriptions…), then ‘translated’ in full by Yang Shuang-zi, then actually translated by Lin Kang into English. This doesn’t particularly come up throughout the novel (though there are footnotes from both Yang and Kang explaining cultural specificities in the text), but the various translator / editor / author’s notes surrounding the book are quite amusing.