Taiwan Travelogue

Taiwan Travelogue
by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, Lin King (translator)
320 pages, Graywolf Press (2024)

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Traditionally I’ve had a difficult time with Booker Prize winners; I’m not always sure what it is about being shortlisted or winning that makes them impenetrable in the first pages so I set them aside unread. I don’t recall what made me place a hold on this one. I’m glad I did.

Taiwan Travelogue took me somewhere unexpected from the very start. On its surface it’s a story about a female Japanese travel writer touring 1930s colonial Taiwan with her Taiwanese interpreter. Beneath that, it’s a layered examination of power after some surfaces have been polished smooth. It explores colonisation wearing the costume of hospitality, curiosity, and friendship; appetite, too. Aoyama Chizuko eats her way through her sightseeing with a voracity that is its own kind of consuming. I found myself snacking through every description. I am grateful it is a slim book.

I could see what was happening long before Aoyama Chizuko could. Or perhaps because of my distance as Reader, before she allowed herself to. That gap is critical. The space between what the reader understands and what the characters choose to know, that is where this novel goes from interesting to sublime. I found myself trying to read faster not because I was comfortable, but because I needed to know whether things would improve, or whether they would get worse. And I was also trying to slow down so I could savor those moments, the quiet ones that hinted towards friendship. As with most books, and life, it was a reading I am still digesting.

The literary structure is a delight. I love footnotes, and these do more than whimsically annotate. This is a doubly translated work: the fictional layer is the crux of the story itself; Lin King then had to carry every one of those nuances into English with enough precision and grace to earn its place as the 2026 Booker Prize winner. A reader who glosses over the layers will miss much of what makes this text remarkable. It is worth reading every word.