BOOKS FROM TAIWANTaiwan Travelogue : A Novel
Tags:
Female author
Description:
FINALIST FOR 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. 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.
Reviews:
(1 month ago) |
13 Sep, 2025
Eat (and flirt) your way around Taiwan. Sweet, delicate and delectable with a bitter-sweet aftertaste.
THE AUDIOBOOK IS ABRIDGED, WITH NO WARNING! I only discovered this half way through the audiobook - I became very puzzled why the blurb described the novel as “Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text”, as there is no hint of this in the audiobook. Turns out the audiobook is missing the crucial prologue and the five afterwords, as well as all the footnotes. Luckily I found a text copy and immediately read the prologue, and then afterwards, the afterwords. I can live without the footnotes.
On the positive side, the audiobook gives a delightful performance of the enthusiastic writer and her demure translator. Also, you get the correct pronunciations of the various languages (I hope it’s correct!)
|
Add comment
More books from Taiwan
More books from Read Around Asia Challenge
