Just reading the author’s polished description of subtropical cuisine makes me hungry. Then, I am overwhelmed by the bitter and sad emotions that follow.

“Taiwan Travelogue,” a novel originally written in Mandarin by Taiwanese author Yang Shuang-zi and translated into English by Lin King, was awarded this year’s International Booker Prize, which is considered a steppingstone to the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Yang is only the second author from East Asia to win this prestigious award. The first was Han Kang, a South Korean, in 2016.

Set in Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule in 1938, the story explores........

© The Asahi Shimbun