圖書搜尋

Yang, Shuang-Zi's Taiwan Wanderings is the winner of the National Book Awards' Translated Literature in 2024 When four master's students, each with their own concerns, encounter a mysterious and enigmatic landlady, the story unfolds. These five contemporary Taiwanese women, each from different backgrounds and in their twenties or thirties, find themselves living together, supporting each other, and even sparking romantic feelings in a preserved Japanese-style house from the Showa era.

In Huwei, central Taiwan, a military family settlement sees successive waves of residents arrive, hoping to find a place to call home. What none suspect is that their dreams are intimately tied to the ghosts of WWII and martial law that still haunt the area. Constructed on the site of a former Japanese air force base, the Huwei military family settlement housed Nationalist soldiers and their dependents who retreated to Taiwan in 1949. The four tales in this graphic novel move through various periods of time, weaving together the lives of the residents of Huwei with the voices of ghosts from the past, thereby addressing the complex history of the Americans, Japanese, mainland Chinese, and local Taiwanese who have all left their mark there.

Tsuan-Ti Chen was born in a small town in central Taiwan during Japanese rule (1895 – 1945). He studied in Japan to become a doctor and was drafted to fight in South-East Asia for Japan in World War II. When his ship was sunk by enemy fire, he was sent to Saigon where he experienced personal pain and the fragility of life in the brutal realities of war. Miraculously, he survived and made his way back home but things were far from peaceful. Two years after the war, he was selected as one of the leaders to defend his town against the nationalist government’s violent suppression of 228 Incident. Between his personal calling and his family and friends, which should he choose to sacrifice? The Man Returning from Afar portrays how a generation of Taiwanese choose their path of life in a time of turmoil.