Bert Scruggs's Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film studies important writers and their significant contributions produced within Taiwan's rich literary scene during Japanese rule. In addition, the book traces the political agendas of translators to demonstrate how anthologies of the era's fiction have highlighted particular sentiments at the expense of presenting Taiwan's colonial fiction in all of its colorful complexity. Translingual Narration also accounts for Japanese-to-Chinese translations of colonial Taiwanese fiction, as well as films that were made during the colonial era or postcolonial films that depict the colonial era of Taiwan. This multifaceted approach enables an examination of Taiwanese fiction outside of the typical frameworks that designate Taiwanese fiction as either literature of the Japanese Empire or as Chinese fiction. Scruggs describes his study in this way: “It articulates colonial identity concerns, how postcolonial translators and critics transmitted those concerns, and how those translators and critics leave traces of their own contemporary identity concerns on the works that are, in theory at least, restricted to the colonial” (p. 10).

Following a brief introduction, chapter 2 focuses on “problems of language, translation, and critical space” (p. 34). Scruggs summarizes strategies used in the academy to define Taiwanese literature: among others factors, is it Taiwanese due to the language it is written in, the ethnicity of its authors, or a particular location that shaped the identities of its authors and the worlds they describe in their fiction? Chapter 3 moves to issues surrounding “ethnicity and the politics of location” (p. 34), and the following two chapters address issues of class and female subjectivity, respectively. Chapter 6 describes, as it is titled, “The Appearance of Colonial Taiwan in Fiction and Film,” and while the discussion of film does not achieve the same degree of complexity as the book's inquiries into written texts, it contains a wonderful discussion of the “affective and pragmatic dimensions of memory,” the ways in which memory arrives unexpectedly or memory is activated in order to recall a particular detail, as outlined in the work of Paul Ricoeur. This understanding of memory, and its relationship to nostalgia and solastalgia, carefully frames Taiwanese films such as Viva Tonal: The Dance Age (Jian Weisi and Guo Zhendi, 2003), and Emerald Horizon (Guo Liangyin, 2006).

Major authors and their representative works are organized throughout Translingual Narration with clear subheadings, and chapters are concluded with brief reflections on each chapter's primary objects of inquiry, bolstered by the inclusion of an additional theoretical idea or concept, such as the notion of free will in chapter 3, or the nature of material and spiritual spheres described in relation to the representations of female individuality in chapter 5. Scruggs discusses writers Weng Nao, Wang Changxiong, and Wu Zhuoliu in chapter 3; Yang Shouyu, Zhu Dianren, Wang Shilang, and Yang Kui in chapter 4; and Zhang Bihua, Ye Tao, Huang Baotoa, and Yang Qianhe in chapter 5.

Describing Taiwan's intersectional and multifaceted history, let alone the dreams and imaginary recorded in its beautiful stories, requires the ability to consolidate a large dataset with multiple variables without oversimplifying the particulars. Scruggs possesses this gift. He clearly and succinctly conveys essential summaries of both authors and their representative works that future English-speaking scholars of East Asian literature will undoubtedly rely on for some time. For example, he sketches Yang Kui's life from his birth in southern Taiwan to his “at least eleven arrests” in Japan during his time in Tokyo and his imprisonment by the KMT after the 228 Incident in such a way that readers can feel how these experiences shaped Yang Kui's writing (p. 63). The payoff is that an understanding of these experiences allows readers to then appreciate how Yang Kui's work differs from that of other authors such as Wang Shilang, who set stories in urban Taihoku with such clarity that readers arrive at a sense of what downtown Taipei must have looked and felt like during the early twentieth century (p. 80).

It is good that this work's title contains important search terms because it will enable future readers to easily locate it in search engines and university libraries, where it should be made available. However, I would note that the book does not explore the theoretical complexities of either “translingual” or “narration” to the extent I expected and would have preferred. Nor are these terms presented in contradistinction to the “transpacific” or the “sinophone” or other theoretical frameworks currently in use, which is a shame because the text provides every reason to believe that Scruggs could distinguish and justify the use of these terms in just a few additional pages; thus the subtitle is in fact the text's more accurate title: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film. Notwithstanding my opinion of the book's title, the text is both essential and highly recommended for research or university instruction purposes. The lives of the authors presented and the ideas their stories generate will remain with readers long after reading it.