Taiwan Travelogue - Yáng Shuāng-zǐ
On the surface, Taiwan Travelogue looks like exactly what it professes to be - a cosy, quiet novel about food, travel, and unrequited love between two women. A Japanese novelist travels around pre-war, Japanese-occupied Taiwan alongside a brilliant local translator, a woman with deep knowledge of the island's layered culture and history. The novelist has been officially invited to deliver a lecture series, and plans to spend a year writing travelogue articles for Japanese publications. It's a familiar setup: writer moves to foreign land, lives like a local, befriends a native who can help dissolve the exoticism of the place into digestible prose to send home.
But Yáng Shuāng-zǐ does something subversive with these tropes. The translator's notes describe this as an onion of a novel, and that's exactly right. Beneath the quiet cosiness, tension is constantly bubbling. There's the tension of colonisation, of what an enforced language does to a people's culture and society. We're reminded from the outset that the narrator - the writer, our sole point-of-view character - is a coloniser, and we're never allowed to forget it. Footnotes interrupt the narrative throughout, correcting her language, challenging her history, and pointing out that many of the things she's describing no longer exist, casualties of colonialism, of travel and tourism. She is entirely unaware of the power she wields. This is, at its core, a book about quiet, polite power dynamics.
Large sections are devoted entirely to food: lists of local dishes, descriptions of flavours, comparisons with mainland cooking, ruminations on names and preparation. I found myself initially charmed by these passages, then gradually bored, and eventually skimming them. I initially felt guilty about that, but by the end of the novel, I think that response is entirely intentional. We're meant to grow tired of the narrator's self-indulgence, the sound of her own voice. This is presented as a love story, but I don't think it's a love story between two women. I think it's a love story between the narrator and the sound of her own voice.
The novel is also a remarkable nesting doll of translations. Fictional translators conduct conversations in the footnotes alongside Lin King, the real translator, who in her closing note reflects on the experience. She discusses being tempted to invent an extra meta-layer for the English translation, and laments that footnotes are so rarely used in literary translation. She tells us that they gave her space to explain context, historical detail, and her own translation choices in the moment, rather than saving everything for an end note.
I find myself agreeing with her desire for more footnotes in translations. The footnotes here reminded me of Jennifer Croft's work in The Extinction of Irena Rey, another novel deeply preoccupied with language and the politics of translation. And they also brought to mind Paige Morris's translator's note in Han Kang's We Do Not Part, where she describes defaulting to Yorkshire English to render a working-class local dialect on the page, a decision I would have loved to encounter as a footnote while reading, rather than discover afterward. More footnotes in translated fiction, please. Publishers, if you're reading this.
Taiwan Travelogue is intricate, layered, and quietly furious. I suspect I'll begin to see reviews calling it cosy fairly soon. It is not cosy. It's a book about tension, about violence, about colonialism and empire, about national identity and personal identity. I'm very glad I picked it up, and I'm excited to see what the rest of the International Booker longlist holds.