Taiwan Travelogue - Yáng Shuāng-zǐ
Leaf & Lens | A Reader's Review
★★★★★ - 5 / 5 stars
Some books arrive wearing a disguise. Taiwan Travelogue presents itself as a rediscovered Japanese travel memoir from the 1930s, complete with footnotes, archival framing, and the quiet authority of a historical document. And then, slowly, it begins to do something else entirely. Something that gets under your skin and refuses to leave.
It is 1938. A celebrated Japanese writer named Aoyama Chizuko travels to colonial Taiwan, officially to write a culinary travelogue for a Japanese readership. She is assigned a local interpreter, a Taiwanese woman named Ō Chizuru, referred to throughout with warmth as Chi-chan. What begins as a professional arrangement becomes the emotional spine of the entire novel. Two women, eating their way through an island, reaching toward each other across a gap that neither food nor affection can fully close.
The conceit is brilliant. Yáng Shuāng-zǐ is a Taiwanese author writing in Chinese, and she has constructed an entire fictional Japanese manuscript — complete with a translator's note by the fictional editor — that is then actually translated into English by Lin King. There are layers inside layers here, and every single one of them is doing work. This is metafiction that earns its complexity rather than wearing it as decoration.
I want to talk about the food because this is not a novel that uses food as atmosphere. It uses food as argument. Every dish Chizuko encounters and describes with her exoticising Japanese eye is also a political document. The braised minced pork prepared differently by Hokkien and Hakka communities. The wheel cakes that arrived with Japanese colonisation and quietly became Taiwanese. The twelve-dish banquet at the end of the novel that is practically a manifesto about Taiwanese culinary identity, presented with the confidence of a cuisine that has earned its own name.
Through Chizuko's enthusiastic appetite and Chizuru's careful, guarded guidance, you begin to understand something the textbooks never quite communicate: that colonialism does not only live in laws and violence. It lives at the dinner table. In who prepares the meal, who names it, who gets to write about it, and who gets to decide what it means.
The relationship between Chizuko and Chizuru is what broke me open. Chizuko is not a villain. She is warm, genuinely curious, and deeply fond of Chizuru. She wants a friendship of equals. She reaches for it repeatedly, with every meal, every late evening conversation, every moment of shared laughter on the road. And Chizuru, equally warm, equally fond, keeps a precise professional distance. Not out of coldness. Out of clarity.
There is a line in the novel that lands with the weight of everything the book has been building toward. Chizuru tells Chizuko plainly that it is impossible for a Mainlander and an Islander to share a friendship of equals. Not because she does not want it. Because the structure they are both living inside will not allow it. No amount of goodwill changes the architecture.
Yáng does not let Chizuko off the hook for this, and she does not condemn her either. She simply shows you the gap. The gap between intention and impact. Between affection and justice. Between the story one person tells about a relationship and the story the other person has to live. It is one of the most honest portrayals of colonial intimacy I have come across in fiction.
Chizuko is also a gloriously unreliable narrator, and the novel plays with that with considerable elegance. She misses things. She interprets scenes through the lens of her privilege and her longing. And the footnotes — those seemingly dry scholarly interventions — quietly, persistently correct her, filling in what she cannot see or refuses to acknowledge. It is a structural choice that is formally playful and emotionally devastating at the same time.
Lin King's translation deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as the novel itself. The English text hums. It carries the warmth and restraint of Chizuko's voice while embedding Taiwanese and Japanese words with a lightness that never feels like a glossary exercise. The language itself becomes part of the argument about power, about who gets to name things, about what gets lost in every act of translation.
This is a National Book Award winner for Translated Literature and it earns that recognition without effort. But what I will actually carry from this book is quieter than any award citation. It is the image of two women sharing ten dishes meant for eight, full and laughing and briefly, almost, equal. And the ache that follows when you remember that almost is doing all the work in that sentence.
Taiwan Travelogue is a novel about an island, a friendship, an era, and a cuisine. It is also a novel about the stories that get told and the stories that get buried, and what it costs the people who know the difference. Yáng Shuāng-zǐ has written something genuinely rare: a book that is pleasurable on the surface and devastating underneath, and that treats both of those qualities as equally serious.
Read it slowly. Look up the dishes. Let Chizuru's silences speak to you.
Rating: ★★★★★
For readers who love: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong, Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, and anyone who has ever loved someone across a distance that was never really about geography.