Yáng Shuāng-zǐ: There are two levels to that answer.

Externally, I was thinking about Taiwanese literary history. The language of a text from a hundred years ago is very different from the language we use today. That is why I wanted to put the concept of translation inside the book itself.

There is also a personal reason. My pen name means “twins”. My late sister was not able to use this pen name while she was alive, and I wanted to bring her into the fiction. In using this name, and in creating this work, I am also including her in the act of creation.

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ: Food can preserve local history in a way that is different from official history.

For example, architecture from the colonial era may be removed or altered. Food remains inside daily life. It is carried on through culture. It becomes a vector of historical development. The by-products of colonialism are not only in documents or buildings; they are also in the food people touch and eat every day. That is something I wanted readers to notice.

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ: On the surface, the book may seem like a romance. That framework makes it possible to draw readers toward the deeper questions I wanted to discuss.

Of course there is a balance to consider. There are different proportions between romance, history, politics and violence. The work was in deciding how those elements could exist together without one cancelling the other.

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ: I have experienced that conflicted feeling myself, between those two positions. Because of that, I wanted to write about it.

Internally, within Taiwan, we also have our own conversation about this period. When Taiwanese literature looks back at the era of Japanese rule, it is often through misery, and it is often male-oriented. I do not think that is the full picture. I wanted to show another aspect of that era — something beautiful, something tender — without saying that beauty excuses colonial domination.

Despite the modernisation and other things that came with Japanese colonisation, we do not want to lose ourselves. We do not want to surrender autonomy or sovereignty, or become part of Japan. That is why it is important for readers to finish the book and understand the whole of what I am trying to convey.

Lin King: All of those things are tied together. But the element I initially struggled with most, and ended up feeling proudest of, was preserving the historical linguistic accuracy of what the spoken languages would have been.

Yáng writes in Mandarin. But Mandarin was only brought to Taiwan following the Chinese Civil War, really from 1949 onward. Before that, Mandarin was very rarely spoken in Taiwan. It is now our “national language”; it is what we converse in and learn in school. But in the actual content of the story, nobody would be speaking Mandarin. They would be speaking Japanese and Taigi.

So there was a question at the beginning: if we are not presenting Taipei as “Taipei”, will anyone recognise the places in this book? Is it too much to ask readers to match these historical names to their modern counterparts? But the word “Taipei” did not exist in that form in the period of the novel. It would not have been pronounced that way.

We made the decision to use archaic Japanese terms and romanisation — forms that are rarely seen in anglophone literature. That was part of preserving the historical reality of the book.

Lin King: In the original, there is no “real” aside to the reader. Every foreword, footnote and afterword is fictionalised.

Even the afterword is written from the perspective of Yáng’s late sister. There is an element there where Yáng positions herself in the fiction as the twin who has passed, rather than the twin who is still with us. So nothing in the original apparatus is straightforwardly real.

The English translation complicates that by adding a real translator’s note. I do think that amplifies the meta-ness of the text. For a casual reader, that may not be what they are looking for. But for readers interested in experimental moves in contemporary fiction, I hope it becomes another point of intrigue.

Lin King: I think so.

I hope that by being outspoken about it, and talking about it, we can change some outdated industry beliefs — especially the idea that if you market a book as translated fiction, it will hurt sales.

Books like Butter have done so well. The Neapolitan novels have done so well. It is hard to see how the argument still stands that you cannot put the translator on the cover because booksellers will relegate the book to the back.

I am grateful to And Other Stories for being one of the presses that does not follow that form of erasure. And with this book in particular, it would be almost impossible to pretend the translator does not exist. How would you explain the person who keeps appearing in the footnotes? My name is in it. The book becomes a great vessel for translators to say: it does not make sense to pretend we are not here.

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ: Taiwan went through 38 years of martial law. Many people lost their lives or were imprisoned for saying things that authorities believed should not be said. That history produced a mindset in which people separate literature from politics.

In making that statement, I am responding to that belief. We still live with forms of self-censorship. We still tend to separate pop culture from political matters. But over the past twenty years, I do not think there is any such thing as completely separating political belief from daily life or creative work.

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ: Taiwan is a country with a great deal of diversity. I hope this book increases readers’ curiosity and leads them toward self-discovery or self-education about Taiwan.

As a novelist, this is my presentation. Lin is also translating other Taiwanese fiction, and those works will represent other aspects and other faces of Taiwan.

Lin King: On a basic level, I think much of the anglophone world is probably not even aware that Taiwan was under Japanese colonisation — and so recently, and for so long.

It lasted fifty years, from 1895 to 1945. Internationally, there is more discussion of Japanese colonialism in Korea, but it is still niche knowledge that Taiwan was colonised for even longer. Taiwanese people were considered subjects of the emperor. They fought in World War II.

That layer of Taiwanese history is so little known abroad. I speak Japanese; I started studying it in the US. As someone who grew up in Taiwan and the US, I have had people ask why Taiwanese people are so obsessed with Japan. And I have to say: we were colonised for fifty years. Our grandparents went to Japanese schools. Our presidential office was built under Japanese rule. There is such a dearth of knowledge around this that if the book gets even that basic fact across, I feel I have done something.

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ: On the surface, when reading the book, you may find it lovely. There is beauty in it. But as you go through the book and finish it, you realise that I am talking about inequality.

The internal conversation in Taiwan also matters here. When Taiwanese literature writes about the period of Japanese rule, it is often about misery and is often centred on men. I do not think that captures the whole picture. I wanted to show another aspect of that era — something beautiful — while still recognising the complicated emotions contemporary Taiwanese people may have toward Japanese colonisation.

Beauty should not erase the question of sovereignty. It should not make readers forget inequality.

Lin King: The wrong lesson would be to look for something that is simply similar to Taiwan Travelogue: more historical fiction, more metafiction, as if that is the only thing from Taiwan that can sell.

I hope publishers can be open to Taiwanese writers approaching literature from all kinds of directions: personal literary fiction, broader historical fiction, romance, cosy fiction, science fiction. I hope Taiwanese literature is not suddenly labelled as “meta historical fiction” and treated as though that is the only form that can travel.

For me personally, that would be terrible, because I am working on many things that are not that. Taiwanese writers are capable of many forms of literature. I hope readers and publishers remain open to that.

Eric Akoto: So not to be pigeonholed.

Lin King: Exactly. Not to be pigeonholed.