Yáng Shuāng-zǐ is a writer of fiction, essays, manga and video game scripts, and literary criticism.
Her novel Taiwan Travelogue, her first book to be translated into English, won the National Book Award for Literature in Translation in 2024 and Asia Society's inaugural Baifang Schell Book Prize.
It has been published or is forthcoming in numerous languages including Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Italian, German, Dutch, Danish, and Greek.
Country: Taiwan
Publisner Name: Graywolf Press
Original Language: Mandarin (Tranditional Chinese)
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—who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name—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 honor, the Golden Tripod Award.
Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.
Read more
