Taiwan Travelogue

Taiwan Travelogue follows Aoyama Chizuko, a fictional Japanese writer, on a year-long visit to Taiwan in 1938, when the island was a Japanese colony. She has been invited and sponsored by the colonial authorities but has little interest in writing propaganda for them. Instead she finds companionship with her interpreter, a cultured and multilingual Taiwanese woman she knows as Chizuru.

The book is framed as Chizuko’s own autobiographical novel, supposedly published in 1954 and later rediscovered and translated from Japanese into Chinese. The English translation is by Lin King.