Chizuko has “a monster’s appetite when it comes to good food”. She says, “I will forever have room in my stomach.”
The year is 1938. Chizuko, a successful author whose debut novel, A Record of Youth, has been made into a movie.She travels from her home on Kyushu, Japan’s third largest island, for an all-expenses-paid lecture tour. Her destination: Taiwan, another island, located in the western Pacific Ocean off the south-eastern coast of China. Ignorant of the Taiwanese language, Chizuko will be accompanied throughout her stay by a dedicated personal interpreter, Ongtshian-hoh ( or in Japanese, O Chizuru)
She is much more than a language expert. Soon after the two women meet, she brings Chizuko an entire wardrobe of new clothing, a library card, local maps, and a list of restaurants. In addition to her duties as an interpreter, she also acts as Chizuko’s personal assistant, travel agent, private chef, and procurer of large quantities of regional foods to meet Chizuko’s daily demands.
What more could a travel author desire? In Chizuko’s case, a lot. Smitten by Chizuru’s sweet-as-honey smile and adorable dimples, as well as her flawless Japanese and remarkable ability to restore harmony in awkward social situations, Chizuko creates wherever she goes, Chizuko begins to pressure Chizuru into deeper intimacies.
Will Chizuru share personal details of her childhood, her career, and her marriage plans? Will Chizuru – pretty please- move into Chizuko’s cottage in Taiwan?….later, will she return to Japan and live there with her in her wealthy family’s home? Can friendship, even love, overcome their differences of language, class, culture, and yet another barrier, the fraught and convoluted history of Taiwan?
The book’s title, TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE, may suggest non-fiction, but it was originally part of an audacious and controversial hoax. An elaborate backstory claimed the book was a 1930s travel journal translated from Japanese. In fact, no such journal ever existed. In another twist, the 2020 Chinese language novel was translated into Japanese in 2023. Multiple end notes by both fictional and real-life editors and translators create deliberate confusion over what’s historical truth and what isn’t. Although this might prove a bit much for some readers, yet the history and complexity support a fascinating narrative in which colonial and cultural implications of translation play an important part.
In the end, TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE is much more than a feast for foodies or a tale for armchair travellers. It’s a journey into the hearts of two unforgettable women who may or may not be able to reconcile friendship, even perhaps love, with the enormous gap in their social status and the vast cultural differences of their lives.
Can love overcome their power imbalance? This International Booker Prize 2026 teases out the nuances of this question against a background of 1930s Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule. The spark is definitely sizzling between the two women. Chizuru is a cipher, enchanting, yet unknowable, resisting all of her friend’s efforts to pierce her carefully constructed mask of professionalism.
This novel pulls off an incredible double feat. It succeeds as both a romance and an incisive post colonial novel. I found it captivating. Food plays a central core to their relationship. Chizuko proves while travelling all over the Land of the South, to be among her many talents, an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuru grows infatuated with her companion, intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. Its only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what that ‘something’ is.
The book’s meta-fictional architecture is quietly audacious, but what makes the story genuinely pleasurable is the treatment of intimacy between the two women. The queer undertone is rendered through the minute economies of shared meals and unfinished sentences, through which Yang smuggles the most profound questions about desire, friendship and colonial entitlement into the everyday. The story is rich and heady as some of the dishes that Chi-Chan prepares for making TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE a multi layered meditation on language and longing and on the many ways in which we travel only to arrive where we started.
