In an era when novels about colonialism tend to preach to the converted or drown in solemn misery, Yáng Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue arrives like a perfectly braised bowl of pork rice; modest, unassuming, and utterly devastating in its quiet brilliance. The 2026 International Booker Prize winner is that rarest of literary creatures; a romance that doubles as an incisive postcolonial critique, a metafictional puzzle that never loses its emotional core, and a translation that sings.
Love under the gaze of empire
The premise is deceptively simple. It is May 1938. Aoyama Chizuko, a young Japanese novelist with a famously monstrous appetite, arrives in Japanese-occupied Taiwan. She has no interest in the colonial government’s banquets or imperialist agenda. What she wants is real island life, authentic cuisine, and freedom. Enter Chizuru; a Taiwanese interpreter younger than Chizuko, sharing the same characters in her name, who proves equally adept at arranging scenic train rides and cooking exceptional meals.
What follows is a slow-burn romance conducted across braised pork rice, winter melon tea, and lively banter. But this is no mere period love story. As judge chair Natasha Brown observed, the novel teases out an agonising question: ‘Can love overcome a power imbalance?’ The answer, Yáng suggests, is both yes and no, and the ambiguity is the point.
The cipher and the stomach
Chizuru is the novel’s great achievement; a character so carefully constructed that her unknowability becomes the engine of the plot. She is enchanting yet distant, professional yet intimate, always holding something back. Every attempt by Chizuko to pierce her mask fails. It is only after a heartbreaking separation that the truth begins to emerge; that the power dynamics of coloniser and colonised cannot be dissolved by good intentions or romantic longing, no matter how genuine.
Yáng, who is Taiwanese, has spoken about the ‘conflicted mix of distaste and nostalgia’ with which many Taiwanese regard the Japanese colonial period. Unlike the uniformly resentful memory of Japanese rule in Korea, Taiwan’s relationship with its colonial past is more tangled. Taiwan Travelogue refuses to flatten this complexity into easy outrage. The novel acknowledges oppression without reducing Taiwanese identities to suffering alone. As translator Lin King puts it: ‘To suggest otherwise is to reduce a culture to its trauma.’
A metafictional masterstroke
The novel’s formal invention deserves equal praise. Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered Japanese travel memoir, complete with introductions, footnotes, and afterwords, Taiwan Travelogue wraps an intriguing metafictional layer around its core love story. King’s translation, maximalist, rule-breaking, and experimental, perfectly conveys the novel’s layered narrative voices. She worked closely with editor Yuka Igarashi at Graywolf to produce what she calls ‘an experimental, multilayered work.’ The footnotes alone are a delight, occasionally veering into scholarly deadpan humour, never disrupting the emotional momentum. This is a book that knows it is a translation, knows it is playing with authenticity, and wants you to know it too. Rather than breaking the spell, this transparency deepens it.
Why it won
The 2026 judges, a panel including mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, translator Sophie Hughes, and novelist Nilanjana S. Roy, chose Taiwan Travelogue from a strong shortlist that included Shida Bazyar’s The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran and Marie Ndiaye’s The Witch. What tipped the scales, I suspect, was the novel’s double feat; succeeding as both a tender romance and a sharp postcolonial novel, without ever letting one mode undermine the other.
Yáng has joked that researching the novel’s food and travel themes ‘made my savings go down and my weight go up.’ That pleasure principle, the belief that humans ‘always manage to find flickers of levity and deep wells of love’ even under oppression, infuses every page. This is historical fiction that refuses to be strictly miserable, and it is all the more truthful for it.