Lin Qing

This book being a pseudo translation, a fake translation, was so that she could translate what happened in history that feels unfamiliar for a modern readership that is maybe hearing about some of these things for the first time. But for a real translator, it then becomes...

This great opportunity to really jump in and sort of flaunt the aspects of the book that are only possible because it's framed as a translation. And what challenges did that bring for you? The story is set in 1930s. This is colonial Japan. A lot of the terms that they were using were from a very imperial perspective. So things that are no longer said in Japan.

modern Japanese, because now they try to respect Taiwan as a separate culture. And in addition, Taiwan, even though since 1945 the national language has been Mandarin Chinese, a lot of times people still speak, say, Hakka or Taiwanese Hokkien, which we now call Daigi. So actually in the story itself, historically, they would have only been speaking Japanese and Daigi.

It's hugely complex. I mean, you'll be very modest about this, but I mean, did this kind of do your head in to some extent where you were trying to grapple with it?

Yeah, and we were working really hard to gauge what point would make the hurdle just too high for the average reader picking up this book in a bookstore. At what point would they just give up because there are too many sets of pronunciations, too many languages, too many things to keep track of. But I think my publishers and I really believed in the reader. We believed that even in this day and age, people can hold their attention, can really dive into a story to learn something.

It's internal logic, it's linguistic systems and still get something entertaining and rewarding out of the story itself. Tell us about food. How important is food to this book? Why is it important?