Taiwan Travelogue :

 Taiwan Travelogue

Taiwan Travelogue is a tale of two young women in their twenties travelling across Japanese-occupied Taiwan in the late 1930s—savouring local cuisines, discovering forgotten stories, and travelling through stunning landscapes along colonial railway routes. But beneath this seemingly gentle travelogue of food, friendship and discovery, Yáng adds another layer through an ingenious metafictional device. The book presents itself as the rediscovery of a lost Japanese travelogue, supposedly written in the 1930s, subsequently translated into Mandarin and finally into English.

Set in the late 1930s, the novel follows Aoyama Chizuko, a young Japanese writer who travels to Taiwan, then a Japanese colony, on a lecture tour. She is assigned Ō Chizuru, a young Taiwanese teacher, as her interpreter and travelling companion. Their journey unfolds through the island's cuisines and colonial railway network, moving across its cities, mountains and coastal landscapes and through the changing seasons.

Yáng builds the novel around a series of contrasts. The Japanese are referred to as Mainlanders, while Taiwanese are Islanders. The railway represents the Japanese colonial modernity, while local food becomes expression of everyday Taiwanese life. And at the centre is the contrast between Chizuko's colonial gaze and Chizuru's lived knowledge of Taiwan.

Chizuko arrives with a desire to discover “Taiwan”. Chizuru, however, wants to show her her Taiwan. She is far more than an interpreter translating Japanese words into another language. She translates Taiwan itself.

Whenever they arrive in a new town, Chizuru takes Aoyama away from official receptions and colonial itineraries and into markets, restaurants and street-food stalls. Through food, she introduces her companion to a Taiwan that cannot be found in government banquets or colonial tourist brochures. Food becomes a language of its own—a way of encountering people, memories and histories.

Their journey to the old mountain town of Kagi, modern-day Chiayi, is particularly revealing. Chizuru takes Aoyama beyond the Japanese colonial name “Kagi” and the later Chinese name, introducing the older name Tirosen, associated with the Indigenous people of the region. She then opens up the history and legends attached to the place, including the story of Prince Wang and the struggles surrounding Tirosen. A seemingly ordinary railway stop therefore becomes a journey backwards through layers of Taiwanese history.

The same process occurs with the people of Taiwan. The novel initially presents a seemingly simple colonial division between Mainlanders and Islanders, but Chizuru gradually dismantles this binary. She explains the composite histories of the island's people—Hoklo, Hakka and Indigenous communities—and the linguistic worlds they inhabit. She herself moves between Japanese, Hokkien, Hakka, Mandarin and Indigenous linguistic and cultural worlds, while understanding the social hierarchy attached to each language.

The railway provides the physical structure for this discovery. Aoyama travels through Taiwan aboard the colonial railway, watching mountains, rivers, bridges, towns and coastlines pass outside the carriage window. And yet, inside the railway carriage, something unexpected happens. The colonial hierarchy momentarily becomes less visible. Aoyama and Chizuru eat together, converse, exchange stories and develop an intimate friendship. Their shared journeys create a space where Japanese traveller and Taiwanese interpreter can, briefly, meet as two young women rather than reflections of an empire and its subject. But the colonial boundary never disappears. Every time their relationship deepens, Chizuru withdraws. At first, her withdrawal seems mysterious. Only gradually does the reader understand that their intimacy is constrained by the enormous historical and social imbalance between them.

That is what makes Taiwan Travelogue much more than a historical romance or a culinary travelogue. It is a novel about how we travel, how we look, and who gets to tell the story of the place we visit. And at its heart is Chizuru—the interpreter who ultimately turns out to be the person interpreting not Taiwan for Aoyama, but Aoyama's understanding of Taiwan for the reader.