Taiwan Travelogue

About

May 1938. A young Japanese novelist arrives in colonial Taiwan on assignment to write a travelogue promoting the island to mainland readers. She is paired with a local Taiwanese woman as her guide, and what begins as an imperial propaganda exercise becomes something far more intimate — a story of two women drawn to each other across the fault lines of language, power, and colonial expectation. Yang Shuang-zi nests a love story inside a sharp examination of how empires narrate the places they occupy. The novel moves between Japanese and Taiwanese perspectives with a precision that makes the politics feel personal and the romance feel political. A book about who gets to tell the story of a place — and what happens when the person you're writing about starts writing back.