A Mandarin-language novel wins a major international prize and centers travel and food as sources of personal transformation. Research for the themes changes the author’s life by reducing savings and increasing weight. The work avoids strictly miserable historical fiction and emphasizes that people find levity and love even during difficult times. The English adaptation blends the author’s and translator’s sensibilities into a voice focused on small pleasures, including travel triumphs, awe while sightseeing, and satisfaction from eating. The narrative is framed as a found travelogue by a fictional novelist traveling through Japanese-occupied Taiwan with an interpreter companion before Taiwan is divided after World War II.
"Research for the novel's central themes of travel and food changed my life in two obvious ways: my savings went down; my weight went up,"
"I personally dislike historical fiction that is strictly miserable. These stories ring to me as untrue, because no matter how difficult times are, I believe that humans always manage to find flickers of levity and deep wells of love."
"The book is framed as the found travelogue of fictional novelist Aoyama Chizuko as she and her assigned companion-interpreter O Chizuru trek their way through a Japanese-occupied Taiwan just before the countries are cleaved in two by the Second World War."
"Questions of imperial power and cultural survival are volleyed between noodle slurps, sunflower seed crunches, and savored bites of high-altitude wasabi imbued with the rare air of the mountain it was grown on."
Read at Conde Nast Traveler
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