Before the journey, a voice from 2020. Hiyoshi Sagako was born in colonial Taiwan to Japanese parents, one of the wansheng: island-born Japanese, looked down on by Japanese from the home islands and never counted among the Taiwanese either. She is amused, and a little stung, that a museum once described her simply as Japanese. In 2015 she heard that a translator named Yang Jo-hui was hunting for an out-of-print Mandarin edition of an old Japanese novel, and she happened to own both that edition and the original. The novel is Taiwan Travelogue, published in 1954 by Aoyama Chizuko, a celebrated writer born in 1913 who debuted at nineteen. In 1938 the colonial government invited her on a lecture tour of the island, a tour Sagako calls what it was: imperial propaganda. The novel turns that year into a story about Aoyama and her interpreter, a young woman whose name can be read three ways: Wáng Chiēn-hò in Mandarin, Ông Tshian-hòh in Taiwanese, Ō Chizuru in Japanese. Sagako once suspected the interpreter was invented; witnesses say she was real. She flags one oddity. The twelfth and final chapter was not in the original manuscript, and she suspects Aoyama wrote it later as an apology, a gentler ending than the one that happened. And she asks the reader to remember, on every page, which side of the empire the narrator stood on.
May 1938, Taichū. Aoyama Chizuko, twenty-five, famous for a novel called A Record of Youth whose film has filled cinemas on the island, steps into Kanjō Bridge Avenue and stops dead. Stalls, smells and three or four languages at once: it is like the magic troupe’s parade she watched in Nagasaki as a girl with her aunt Kikuko. She is here because of a refusal. A magazine offered to pay for a trip south if she wrote cheerleading copy for the Southern Expansion, and she said no, but Taiwan lodged in her head. When the Government-General and a women’s society called the Nisshinkai invited her with every cost paid, she said yes, and came to Taichū alone, eating whatever the platform vendors sold. Now she is tangled up with a young fruit seller over how to wrap a pineapple, until a small woman with dimples sorts it out in perfect Japanese. The grateful vendor presses a packet of kue-tsí on Aoyama, roasted seeds, and the stranger shows her how to crack the shell with her front teeth to reach the kernel. Then Mishima, a stiff clerk from City Hall, arrives for the two o’clock meeting Aoyama forgot and whisks her away. At the Takada residence in Muhō, and at a banquet built for Japanese palates, every request for local food is turned aside; Mishima, it emerges, was once blamed when Japanese guests fell ill from a local clam dish. So Madame Takada has found Aoyama a woman interpreter, a former teacher of Japanese named Ō Chizuru. Aoyama hurries to the waiting room. It is the woman from the market. She promises the market that very afternoon, and gives a second lesson in seeds.
Aoyama starts calling her Chi-chan, though only in her head. Pen in hand, she takes down everything Chizuru explains: how the railway runs, how the 1935 earthquake brought down the famous Gyotōhei Bridge, how the island holds a Hoklo majority who speak Taiwanese, a Hakka minority with its own tongue, and many Indigenous peoples. Asked about herself, Chizuru first recites a careful, loyal answer about the Empire, then admits her family is Hoklo. June brings the rains and a rent-free cottage beside the Yana River, lent by Madame Takada. Chizuru comes twice a week and anticipates everything before Aoyama thinks to ask: clothes for the heat, a library card, bus maps, a list of restaurants. Then the slights begin. At Chizuru’s own old girls’ school a staff member orders her to clean Aoyama’s shoes, and Aoyama corrects him in front of everyone: this is my interpreter. Later she learns that an administrator she trusted sent Chizuru home from another event as unnecessary, a privately hired Islander from a public school. Aoyama skips a luncheon in protest and finds Chizuru at the cottage with a pot of bí-thai-bàk, short rice noodles in pork-bone broth, made because she guessed the formal lunch would not satisfy. Aoyama eats the whole pot. She talks about refusing to write war propaganda and about everyone wanting her married, and then she asks, formally, to be friends. When the rain clears they eat lychees on the veranda, and Aoyama explains that real travel means living through all four seasons in one place, not rushing between famous sights. She will stay a full year, and the book will be called Taiwan Travelogue. Chizuru approves, unlike Aunt Kikuko’s anxious telegrams. Struck by how easily Chizuru quotes the classics, and by a composure so smooth that Aoyama privately compares it to a Noh mask, she asks permission to call her Chi-chan out loud.
In Shōka the film of A Record of Youth is screened and a banquet follows at which the guest of honour has no chance to eat; Chi-chan steers her afterwards to the stalls on Shōsei Street. In a tearoom Aoyama keeps guessing at Chi-chan’s ambitions and keeps missing. Two young women, distant relatives, come in and sneer at Chi-chan in Taiwanese, using the words muâ-înn-thng, jute soup, like a slur, and Aoyama faces them down until they leave. Chi-chan offers to find a replacement interpreter rather than explain; Aoyama insists she is asking as a friend. Walking the old port town of Rokkō, Chi-chan tells her. The Ō family are rich Hoklo landowners around Taichū, and she is a concubine’s daughter; her mother had been a gē-tòa, an entertainer something like a geisha. Neglected and sometimes hungry, she was sent as a child to her mother’s poor relatives who farmed jute, and their bitter leaf soup became the insult. A half-sister later took her back into favour, and now she is engaged to a man educated in Japan, a match her father and sister arranged to spare her the usual fate of a concubine’s child. Aoyama calls it unjust; Chi-chan calls it the best road open. Aoyama works out that the same half-sister found her this job, to polish her Japanese manners before the wedding. From now on, at Aoyama’s request, Chi-chan will call her Aoyama-san instead of Sensei.
On the station platform Chi-chan admits that her one meal with her fiancé was spoiled by thinking how lopsided arranged marriages are, and that she knows of no writer who has told what women actually feel inside them. Then you will have one, Aoyama says: she will write that novel for her. On the train home Chi-chan reads aloud from a Han-language novel Aoyama bought her, translating as she goes a comic tale of Taiwanese gods squabbling, and listening to that clear, measured voice Aoyama suddenly understands. Chi-chan wants to be a literary translator. A light Aoyama has never seen comes into her eyes. At the cottage they spend two hours making muâ-înn-thng together, rubbing the jute leaves by hand and rinsing out the bitter sap, then stewing the green pulp with sweet potato, tiny whitebait and the water the rice was washed in. Before they eat, Chi-chan explains why she has never sat down alone with Aoyama: an Islander working for a Japanese will not share a table as an inferior, only as an equal. Can’t we eat as two people, Aoyama asks, rather than a writer and her interpreter? Now that she is Aoyama-san, Chi-chan says, yes. Their first meal as equals is the soup over rice with Rokkō meatballs, clams and pickled radish. The soup is bitter and then, unexpectedly, sweet. And Chi-chan quietly clears an entire plate of meatballs at astonishing speed: her appetite is as monstrous as Aoyama’s own. Delighted, Aoyama proposes that they eat their way around the whole island. After a moment’s surprise, Chi-chan grins.
Two months in, Aoyama discovers that Chi-chan walks about two kilometres each way to the cottage, often hauling the groceries. She should move in, Aoyama says. Chi-chan has an answer for every argument, so they roll three dice for it, and Chi-chan throws a perfect eighteen against twelve. A second roll, over whether she will at least ride a bicycle, goes Chi-chan’s way too. She has quietly become indispensable: filing notes, stocking snacks, staying late on writing days to cook, spending hours on dozens of fillings when Aoyama idly wishes for jūn-piánn spring rolls. When the housekeeper, Sae-san, remarks that the girl does the work of two salaries, Aoyama is ashamed and takes her to a Japanese restaurant, ordering sashimi first. Islanders cannot really appreciate sashimi, Chi-chan demurs. Aoyama promises her pufferfish in Kyūshū; Chi-chan counters with geh, seafood salted and cured in the sun, on their coming trip to Kagi. On the train south she describes the mountain railway up to Alisan and the young man whose stand against rebels earned the town its name, which means a commendation for righteousness. In Kagi there is a temple at dawn and five kinds of geh ordered from the hotel chef in advance. Moved, Aoyama tells her something she rarely tells. As a child she spent two months alone at a remote mountain shrine living on rations, came down with beriberi, and has been ruled by hunger ever since, and Chi-chan is the only person in Taiwan who has ever truly fed it. Chi-chan’s composure softens; she says she is glad. After a lecture at the girls’ school the feast comes with beer and rice wine, and Aoyama grows drunk and demanding: Alisan, Hakka mochi, the best oyster geh for Chi-chan, and the cherry blossom on Alisan next spring, together, because she has never had a friend to view flowers with. Planting Japanese cherries on this island, she adds, is a brutish thing. Chi-chan, flustered for once, says she cannot make sense of her at all.
September, about six months in, brings three days in Takao for a lecture. Aoyama spots a street vendor’s braised pork rice and wants it, though she has just eaten. Chi-chan refuses: customers eat it standing at the roadside, which is beneath Aoyama’s dignity, and there is a banquet tonight with the local women’s lecture society, whose chef could copy the dish. Aoyama will not hear of it. An imitation in a dining room is not travel. At the banquet a member asks what part women and writers should play in the war, and Aoyama hears herself give safe, hollow answers. Walking back, she marvels at how Chi-chan handles every room, and remembers her on the train identifying a couple as French from a few overheard words, words of affection, Aoyama noticed. Asked what her Taiwan writing is for, Aoyama says she wants to record island culture before assimilation wipes it out, as it has in Hokkaidō and Okinawa. It has already changed, Chi-chan says quietly, and touches her own chōsan, the long Taiwanese dress; the banquet question, she believes, was a dig at her clothes. People only notice the cruelty of erasure, she says, when it is happening to them. A typhoon is coming, but Aoyama insists on seeing the great iron bridge over the Katansui River next morning. On the train she hands Chi-chan a big bag of sweets, and the formality melts. From the bridge the view runs wide, and Aoyama says Taiwan is beautiful; Chi-chan agrees. Back in Taichū, Chi-chan explains the difference between lóo-bah, pork belly braised in chunks, and bah-sò, pork minced fine and, in poorer homes, made mostly from skin. As a child, bah-sò was a rare treat, and she dreamed of eating as much as she liked. Today, Aoyama declares, and adds beer. Chi-chan laughs and gives in, and agrees to drop the polite forms of speech between them. As the typhoon nears Taichū, Aoyama begs her to stay the night. Chi-chan says no. They could always settle it with dice.
October, Tainan. F-sensei is showing them round the First High School for Girls, mostly for Japanese daughters; the Second, mostly for Islanders, is half its size. Aoyama asks whether the Japanese girls call the Taiwanese girls lí-ya. Of course not, says F-sensei, though by coincidence there was recently a fuss over that very word between two fourth-years, Ōzawa Reiko, a Japanese girl, and Tân Tshiok-bi, a Taiwanese one, all cleared up now. The two girls turn out to be their student guides. The word had already found them. At the Tainan Railway Hotel the receptionist called Chi-chan lí-ya and claimed there were no rooms, until she calmly laid out papers showing the Government-General’s sponsorship and his manner flipped. Lí-ya, she explained upstairs, began as a rough way of saying “hey, you” to an Islander and hardened into a slur; her chōsan had probably invited it. At the school, broad-shouldered, outspoken Ōzawa keeps shading slight, boyish Tân from the sun and brushing petals off her shoulder, odd behaviour for enemies. Tân mentions a rumour about a lavatory near Building One where girls vanish. After Aoyama’s lecture the two of them eat their way through the West Market and drink tang-kue-tê, cold winter melon tea, the gourd cooked down with sugar into a dark brick and dissolved over ice. Aoyama loves it at once. On the walk back she says that, to her, Islander and Japanese food, Islander and Japanese dress, are equally beautiful. Chi-chan lifts her purse to hide her face.
That night, sharing a dormitory room, they decide to investigate. In the lavatory they hear a voice call someone lí-ya and ask why she took so long, but when they look, the room is empty except for a photograph of Tân dressed like a boy in Western clothes. F-sensei catches them and sends them to bed. Aoyama is sure the voice was Ōzawa’s but cannot explain how she vanished. Chi-chan lies awake all night working on it. Before dawn she wakes Aoyama, puts the photograph back on the sink, and they hide on the stairs. A slight figure slips in; moments later the room is empty and the photograph is gone. Chi-chan lays it out. She listened to Ōzawa’s room next door all night, and Ōzawa never left. The visitor was Tân, small enough to hide behind an open stall door. And the flower that was on Tân’s collar in the afternoon ended up behind Ōzawa’s ear: Tân is the bold one, and in her mouth lí-ya has become a pet name. The quarrel the teachers punished was a misunderstanding. Great Detective, Aoyama calls her. On the train home Chi-chan peels water caltrops for her, the way she once showed her the seeds, and observes that this is exactly why Aoyama needs her. Aoyama peels one and offers it back, and only then does the sweetness of the winter melon tea seem to reach her fully.
Autumn. Near the cottage Aoyama finds the magenta flower of a wild ginseng, and once Chi-chan names it, she decides to let it be. Over a lunch of Yanagawa hot pot she teases that Chi-chan should move in, good practice, she adds, for running a Japanese household after the wedding. When Chi-chan plays along, Aoyama is annoyed. Dice again; this time Aoyama loses, and Chi-chan offers a small favour as consolation. Aoyama names three: wear Western clothes, spend one night with her at the Taihoku Railway Hotel, and dine there formally at her expense. On the train north Aoyama tallies what does not add up, her French, her ease in any room, her cooking, none of it fitting a concubine’s daughter turned schoolteacher, and proposes a game of a question for a question, which explains nothing. After lunch she angles toward Kyūshū again, and Chi-chan sees a second request underneath. There is one: Aoyama wants to have a kimono made for her. Chi-chan asks for time. On the ride home she asks what Aoyama thinks she is to her. A friend. Chi-chan doubts it, since she is always the one receiving, but half accepts and offers to cook curry. Next day she serves three Taiwanese curries, one made with Spanish mackerel, to make a point: the island has its own cooking, and she need not sail to Japan to taste wonders. She declines Kyūshū outright; with her marriage coming, she wants every day she has left in Taiwan. She also says, at last in her own words, why she wants to translate: novelists make whole worlds out of words, and a translator lets more people walk into them. When Aoyama confesses she asked the gardener to spare the wild ginseng, Chi-chan is touched and compares herself to it, a cheap root passing for something precious. Aoyama will not allow it. The kimono, Chi-chan says, feels like pressure to look more Japanese; Aoyama insists it is protection, between friends. An Islander has an Islander’s dignity, Chi-chan answers. In the end she accepts, and the Noh mask, pleasant and unreadable, comes back down.
A clear December morning, bound for the hot springs at Hokutō, with a lecture the next day at Taihoku’s First High School for Girls. On the train Chi-chan peels a roasted sweet potato and puts it in Aoyama’s hand. She is wearing the new kimono, and the mask. Aoyama offers to release her from the kimono; Chi-chan mentions, pointedly, her wedding, and Aoyama snaps and pleads at once: come to Kyūshū, break off the match, translate, my family will back you. Chi-chan smiles sweetly and turns it aside, and Aoyama can feel the anger under the sweetness. In a Hokutō canteen Aoyama fishes with sideways questions about where she learned to cook, and Chi-chan names the insinuation herself, a café girl, the red-light district, then calmly wipes a smear of miso from Aoyama’s lip with her finger and licks it off, leaving her mortified. In their room that night Aoyama attacks the mask. You are trying to get yourself dismissed, she says, and who else in the world values you as I do? Chi-chan grants it. But Aoyama has a blind spot, she says, one she cannot explain in any terms Aoyama would accept, and from now on they should keep things strictly professional. After a long standoff Aoyama gives in, furious and hollow, and demands sukiyaki. Chi-chan does not eat beef. Aoyama seizes even that, one small true fact about her, and asks only that they keep eating together. Chi-chan agrees. Back in Taichū things are formal but steady. Aoyama makes sukiyaki with pork and explains that it is the dish she keeps for people who matter; as a child, it was the treat after being ill. Without the mask, Chi-chan says that no one has ever cooked a meal just for her. She offers Taichū clam noodles in return, says that Aoyama is special to her, and promises to explain honestly once she finds the words. They agree to keep travelling.
January 1939, north to the port of Kīrun and the hot springs of Kinsan, with a detour so Chi-chan can see the Double Dragon Waterfalls: two white cascades, and the train plunging into a tunnel between them. Aoyama watches Chi-chan instead of the falls and catches a rare, unguarded smile. Chi-chan explains that the island’s first railway tunnel was a flawed Qing-era job, later replaced under Japan. Inspired, Aoyama announces a novel about Taiwan’s railways and offers Chi-chan the Han-language translation. Chi-chan points out quietly that with the Han-language newspaper columns abolished, translation on the island is a dying trade. Kīrun is raining. Chi-chan remembers the port from childhood; Aoyama wants to know what she was like as a little girl, and they bicker playfully. Not cute any more, Chi-chan says, a demon to you, if anything; Aoyama says she would find a demon adorable too. In the Immortals’ Cave they hold hands through a narrow candlelit passage. The rain gets heavier and soaks Aoyama through, and back in their room she reaches to pat the water from Chi-chan’s sleeve. Chi-chan stops her. This is more care than she knows how to receive, she says; would Aoyama do this for the man from City Hall? Then she towels Aoyama’s hair dry. They agree to stop these gestures. A rupture is coming, Aoyama warns. At the end of January Chi-chan takes her to Master A-Phûn, a gentry daughter ruined in the upheavals of the late Qing, who has cooked only for the old matriarch of the Lin family for nearly ten years and does not cook for Japanese. Chi-chan challenges her to dice and wins a single dish. She asks for tshài-bué-thng, leftovers soup. A traditional banquet has twelve courses, she explains, and the soup is made from what remains of all twelve, so to make it A-Phûn must cook the entire banquet, in about two weeks. Overjoyed, Aoyama calls her her best friend, and in the same breath starts on Japan again. Chi-chan cuts her off, cold: change your approach, or I resign. She bows, hands her duties to the City Hall interpreter, and walks out.
Aoyama keeps going back to New Year’s Eve. They had feasted at the cottage and played dice, and for the first and only time Aoyama won, so Chi-chan stayed the night. Why had she never stayed before? Because, Chi-chan admitted, she was afraid of being put in the maid’s room; it would have broken her belief in Aoyama’s kindness. Shaken, Aoyama pushed the two futons together and swore she would never treat her as a servant. They held hands briefly, until Chi-chan told her gently to sleep. Now it is Mishima who turns up as interpreter, and he mentions that Chi-chan had been quietly absorbing public criticism meant for Aoyama, a load he has no intention of carrying. Two days through Tōen and Shinchiku follow, every request for something real refused, Aoyama comparing him to Chi-chan at every stop. When she insists Chi-chan must come to the A-Phûn banquet, Mishima suggests she simply contact her. Aoyama realizes she does not know where Chi-chan lives. Back in Taichū she loses all appetite, until one morning Chi-chan is at the veranda door and makes breakfast, and food tastes like food again. Aoyama puts it to her: you lost that New Year’s game on purpose, as an act of faith in me, and afterwards I did something that broke it. Chi-chan apologizes but still cannot explain. They go together to the Lin family mansion for the banquet.
Master A-Phûn serves all twelve courses, and somewhere in the middle of the meal Aoyama understands that Taiwanese cooking is not a quaint local curiosity but a mature cuisine, layered and restrained, with a character of its own. At the tenth dish, pork belly braised with bamboo shoots, their eyes meet; Aoyama puts a piece on Chi-chan’s plate and Chi-chan returns one, without a word. Afterwards Chi-chan says she had planned to cook tau-mi, a New Year’s dish from Quanzhou in which leftover ingredients are stirred with sweet-potato starch until they bind into one translucent cake, a dish about staying together. She has decided not to. She reminds Aoyama of Ōzawa in Tainan, forever protecting Tân without asking whether Tân wanted protecting. Aoyama has done the same. The person she treasures is a docile Islander interpreter who needs her protection, not the real Ông Tshian-hòh, and without knowing the real one, they cannot be friends. Two small bowls of tshài-bué-thng arrive. Chi-chan takes Aoyama’s hand, squeezes it, and tells her this is their last meal together: she has already given Madame Takada her resignation. Please do not think about me any more, she says.
March 1939. Aoyama drifts. She sleeps late, lives on plain rice and toast, smokes at her desk, and manages only two thin articles on shrines for Mishima, padded out with facts from a railway guidebook. Leafing through the guide, she feels the old pull to travel, and realizes that what she wants is the cherry blossom on Alisan she promised to see with Chi-chan. She accepts Mishima’s invitation to Toyohara instead. She refuses to write him promotional copy about the Emperor’s rice paddies there, until he describes kiâm-nn̄g-ko: bah-sò sandwiched between layers of steamed sponge cake. They tour the imperial paddies, the Toyohara Shrine and a temple to Maso, where a statue of the boy-god Nuózhà, the Third Prince, reminds her of a comic story Chi-chan once translated for her. In a tearoom Mishima produces the cakes, and they taste so much of an old conversation with Chi-chan that she can barely swallow. She praises them anyway, and credits the Empire with blending cultures so deliciously. Something sours in Mishima’s face. Born and raised on the island himself, he finally says what he thinks. She loves Taiwan as a curiosity, an exotic treat, never on its own terms; and nothing in the world is harder to refuse than goodwill that is certain of its own righteousness. It is the blind spot Chi-chan could not name. Back at the cottage, Aoyama goes to the kitchen and eats all six remaining cakes.
She wakes at dawn and walks. It is a little over two kilometres from her corner of Taichū, in the northwest, to the Islander settlement in the southeast where Chi-chan lives: the walk Chi-chan made two or three times a week for eight months, and that Aoyama never once made the other way. She finds her, and they sit on a long bench outside the village shop. Aoyama apologizes formally, owning her arrogance, without asking to be forgiven. Then she says what she has worked out. Chi-chan’s mother died young, and three of her gē-tòa friends raised the girl at a café called Kohaku, Amber, and taught her languages, manners and how to protect herself; that is how Ông Tshian-hòh became the schoolteacher Ō Chizuru. Chi-chan confirms it. Weeping, she admits that she never truly opened her heart to Aoyama, and says again that a Japanese and an Islander cannot be friends as equals. Aoyama does not argue the point. Feelings between people who are not equal can still be real, she says, even when they are imperfect. Chi-chan concedes that whatever lies behind her closed heart is real too. They hold each other’s hands tightly.
Their last meeting is on the Taishō Bridge over the Green River, the line between the Japanese town and the Islander one. It is the last day of March 1939. They share a single bowl of mitsumame, shaved ice heaped with jelly and fruit, sweet with a sour edge, and eat it together on the bridge, one last time.
Then the documents. In 1970 Aoyama Yōko, an artist and Aoyama’s adopted daughter, writes that Taiwan hung over her whole childhood. When she first read the manuscript as a girl she cried at how sad it was, and her mother told her it was true. Yōko asked one question: after the savory cakes, did you go and see Chi-chan? The twelfth chapter exists because of that question, added at her urging. Before the book was reissued, as My Taiwan Travelogue with Tshian-hòh, she went to Taiwan to look for Chi-chan and could not find her.
In 1977, from Columbia, Missouri, Wáng Chiēn-hò, the woman Aoyama called Chi-chan, writes the preface to her own Mandarin translation. Yōko had visited her in 1976, bringing the 1970 edition and the news that Aoyama was dead. She tells one story, about noodles: a cold snap at the end of 1938, Aoyama sick in bed, Chi-chan arriving with medicine, and Aoyama refusing it and demanding noodles instead. She lets slip what all that feeding cost her. And she admits that if she had followed Aoyama to Japan, she might have been happy.
In 1990 her eldest daughter, the literary scholar Wu Cheng-mei, explains why that translation took so long to reach anyone. Yōko had written to her in 1975, but only after martial law was lifted in 1987 did her mother want it published for Taiwanese readers, and even then it appeared in a small, censored edition titled A Japanese Woman Author’s Taiwan Travelogue. In 2020 a new translator, Yang Jo-hui, tells how she and her twin sister first came across the book in Japan, how a museum put her in touch with Hiyoshi Sagako, and how she finished a fresh translation while ill.
Last comes the one note that is not invented. Lin King, the English translator, explains why Aoyama lives in Taichū and not Taichung: the colonial Japanese readings remind you that every line was spoken in Japanese, the empire’s language, even as you read it in English. And she says plainly what all the layers were built to hide. There was no Aoyama, no rediscovered manuscript, no chain of daughters and translators; the travelogue, its notes and its afterwords are all Yang Shuang-zi’s invention. The book’s last pages call it a piece of amber, with the real past and an imagined, kinder one held inside it together.
Outside the book: Yang Shuang-zi was a pen name shared by twin sisters, Yang Jo-tzu and Yang Jo-hui. After Jo-hui died of cancer, Jo-tzu kept writing under it, and the novel is dedicated to her late sister, whose name the novel gives to its ailing 2020 translator. When the book first appeared in Taiwan in 2020, its paper sash named Aoyama Chizuko as author and Yang as translator, and some readers bought it believing it was a real rediscovered travelogue; from the third printing only Yang is credited, with a note that the book is fiction from its first page to its last. Lin King’s English translation won the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature, the first book from Taiwan to do so, and in May 2026 the International Booker Prize, the first winner originally written in Mandarin. The Double Dragon Waterfalls are gone now; after the war a road bridge cut across the view and turned the water aside.