The Taiwanese public took note when Markéta Pekarová Adamová, speaker of the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, led an unprecedentedly large delegation of 160 people to our island in 2023. 

In May of the same year, Mi:Lu Publishing, a publisher of Taiwanese works, created a stir of its own at Book World Prague, the Czech Republic’s largest book fair.

Tomáš Řízek, a Czech illustrator and long-term resident of Taiwan, has played an important role in promoting exchanges between Taiwan and the Czech Republic.

Textual beginnings

Though we exist on opposite sides of the world, Taiwan and the Czech Republic have a long history of warm relations. It’s hardly surprising that that warmth has literary roots: in the old days, reading was the most accessible means of bridging great distances.

Thirty years ago, the Taiwanese publication of novels by renowned Czech writers such as Milan Kundera and Bohumil Hrabal created such a stir that even people who hadn’t read titles such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Too Loud a Solitude knew the books’ names, and we all became a little more familiar with the Czech Republic.

On the Czech side, Czech illustrator Tomáš Řízek worked with Taiwan’s Grimm Press to publish an illustrated version of Alibaba and the Forty Thieves in Taiwan in 2007. That same year, Pavlína Krámská, a Czech student of Chinese at Prague’s Charles University, came to Tamkang University as an exchange student.

The two of them, with their varying levels of connection to Taiwan, went on to found Mi:Lu Publishing in 2014 as a translator and publisher of Taiwanese works. Krámská, as editor-in-chief, handles book selection and translation, while Řízek takes care of illustration, design, and operational management. The company has come to play an important role in introducing Taiwanese culture to Czech society.

Řízek often paints with tempera, which makes for bold, deep colors.

Beautifully lost

Řízek, a long-term resident of Taiwan, has a connection to the island that goes back 20 years. “Taiwan has been a special page in my life, but it’s less something I chose than something that just stepped into my life.” Over the years, he has proved instrumental to spurring bilateral cultural exchanges, and has been honored for his role by the Czech government with a Silver Jan Masaryka Honorary Medal and a Gratias Agit Award.

He recalls that it was a friend who first got him to come to Taiwan. Already used to cooperating across national borders as a freelancer in Europe, he very naturally began seeking out opportunities to work with Taiwanese publishers soon after arriving here. As jobs rolled in with local publishers, exhibitions and illustration studios, the focus of his work shifted to Taiwan. The balance tilted even more strongly towards Taiwan when he established the Taiwanese branch of Mi:Lu in 2017.

Creating the cover art and illustrations for Czech translations of Taiwanese works of literature while also running a publishing company has helped him grasp Taiwan’s transition from the Japanese colonial era to the postwar era. His illustrations have added color to the Czech editions of Yang Mu’s Memories of Mount Qilai, Wu Ming-yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes and Liu Ka-shiang’s Opinions of the Baby Flying Squirrel, all of which were published by Mi:Lu.

Taiwan also provides fodder for his creative work. Řízek has worked with illustrated-book author Kate Dargaw to release a set of illustrated volumes entitled The Song of Mountains, Forest and Sea, based on Taiwanese Aboriginal myths. A rarity for the Taiwan market in terms of their subject matter, the books earned a Ministry of Culture recommendation as an outstanding choice for elementary and middle-school extracurricular reading, and were even exhibited in the Taiwan pavilion at the Guadalajara International Book Fair.

Krámská chose to name the company milu using the Chinese characters for Père David’s deer (Elaphurus davidianus) because it is pronounced similarly to a Czech word for pleasant or appealing and is also a homophone of the Chinese for “losing one’s way.” For Řízek, his Taiwan journey has likewise been something of a beautiful, “lost” adventure.

The Japanese book market has been gripped by a newfound enthusiasm for Taiwan. The photo shows the well-stocked Taiwan section of Books Tokyodo’s Kanda Jinbōchō store.(courtesy of Tai-tai Books)

Audrey Tang fever gripped the Japanese book market during the pandemic. (courtesy of Tai-tai Books)

A decade in the making

Looking to transnational publishing activities with countries nearer at hand, Huang Bijun, a veteran Japanese translator and copyright agent, says that Taiwan’s presence in the Japanese book market has soared in recent years for both historical and geographical reasons.

Taiwan has long enjoyed vigorous commercial, agricultural and tourism exchanges with Japan, but it’s only in the last five or ten years that publishing has caught up. Huang recalls that when she moved to Tokyo in 2009, she hardly ever saw a Taiwanese book in Japan’s mass-­market bookshops.

Although even in those days a few Taiwanese titles were available in translation from academic presses, they tended to be purely literary works whose translators and readership were both limited to academia. The books sold few copies and rarely made it into wider distribution.

Huang tells us that the key reason for the relative sparsity of Taiwanese titles in Japan was that “even though Taiwan and Japan are both Asian countries that share many connections and interactions, our cultures and perspectives are very different.” She explains that Japan’s culture is more conservative than Taiwan’s. The country also had an already well-developed publishing ecosystem, and a readership accustomed to reading domestic works. The latter stands in stark contrast to Taiwan, where readers habitually consume large quantities of translated literature.

The situation changed in the wake of 2011’s Tōhoku Earthquake, when Taiwanese were quick to make large donations to the relief effort. Japan’s surprise and gratitude for Taiwan’s warmth and compassion led to the emergence of a grassroots “Thank you, Taiwan” movement. Taiwan-related articles and reports subsequently began popping up on TV and in magazines such as Figaro, Hanako, Brutus and Pen+.

Translators play an important role in introducing Taiwan to the world. In the photo, translator Kentaro Amano (far left) and author Wu Ming-yi (far right) attend a 2016 forum on translating literature from Taiwan. (courtesy of Tai-tai Books)

Translated editions of five of Wu Ming-yi’s books were released in Japan in 2021, an unprecedented number for even a well-known author. (courtesy of Tai-tai Books)

Complementary cultural perspectives

In 2012, Huang and Japanese translator Kentaro Amano founded Bunbundo Translate Publishing LLC in hopes of bringing more Taiwanese books to Japan.

Having seen Tsai Ming-liang’s film The Hole and come to know Taiwan as a young person, Amano went on to study Chinese at National Taiwan Normal University and also studied under author and political activist Chen Fang-ming.

Amano saw parallels between certain Taiwanese and Japanese works. He found Lung Ying-tai’s Big River, Big Sea similar to The Tale of the Heike in its depiction of the grinding of the gears of time and war, and of the competition and conflict between eras, nations and perspectives. In The Illusionist on the Skywalk, set against a backdrop of the decline of Taipei’s Chunghwa shopping center, he saw a magician’s trick that stirred a familiar nostalgia.

Though Bunbundo shuttered in 2018 following Amano’s untimely death, while it was operating it managed to publish 12 books from Taiwan and place them in Japan’s mass-market bookstores.

Huang Bijun has done yeoman’s work placing Taiwanese books in Japanese bookstores.

The free expression of Taiwanese works

Over time, book selections attuned to Japanese tastes and Amano’s outstanding translations brought the company’s years of pioneering work to fruition.

Nowadays, publishers launch roughly 30 new Taiwanese books into the Japanese market each year. In addition to weighty novels, these include titles that speak to different segments of the reading public, such as detective and supernatural fiction, and works from the humanities field.

Even the pandemic failed to stop this rising tide of exchanges. In 2021 Wu Ming-yi, a perennial international awards nominee sometimes referred to as “Taiwan’s answer to Haruki Murakami,” saw the release of Japanese-­language editions of five of his books: The Land of Little Rain, The Man with the Compound Eyes, Routes in the Dream, The Illusionist on the Skywalk and The Stolen Bicycle. Meanwhile, Japanese publishers Kadokawa, Kawade Shobō Shinsha, Hakusuisha and Bungeishunjū jointly sponsored an unprecedented online talk between Wu and veteran book critic Yumi Toyozaki.

Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s minister of digital affairs, experienced a similar pandemic-era surge in popularity that saw numerous Japanese publishers sending staff to Taiwan to interview her and then publishing books based on these interviews. Around the same time, a Japanese publisher released a Japanese-language edition of a book on parenting written by Tang’s mother, Lee Ya-ching. In fact, the Japanese market saw the introduction of more than ten books related to Tang during this period.

After Amano’s passing, Huang’s own Tai-tai Books, an authors and rights agency consisting of Huang and three Japanese partners with deep connections to Taiwan, picked up the torch of promoting Taiwanese books in Japan.

While Tai-tai Books isn’t itself a publisher, Huang says it does “everything but publish.” The team drives the prepublication process by actively recommending books to Japanese publishers, handling publishing rights, and managing translation. After publication, Tai-tai plans the books’ marketing and manages their social media presence. The company is an online and offline dynamo launching Taiwanese topics into the Japanese book ­market.

For example, Yang Shuangzi’s Taiwan Travel Chronicles, which is set in Taiwan during the period of Japanese rule and uses “translationisms” to masquerade as a translated text, went into a fourth printing just one year after its release. Lin Yu-te’s Ringside, which takes professional wrestling as its subject, became a hot topic among wrestling fans. And Chi Wei-jan’s Private Eyes, a detective novel with a “social documentary” element published more than a decade ago, suddenly overcame Western domination of the genre by becoming a hit with Japanese readers and winning the reader-selected Honyaku Mystery Award.

The strong demand from Japan’s fully developed genre reading market for all kinds of mass-market fiction has roiled Taiwanese publishing, driving sales by expanding the market for published works and generating new interest in books published years ago. This new demand is not only encouraging Taiwanese writers, but also spurring a new wave of Taiwanese creativity.

Tai-tai Books helped arrange publication of the Japanese edition of Hung Ai-chu’s A Girl Can Cook and set up this author talk at a Tokyo bookstore. Hung is seated in the front row, third from the right. (courtesy of Tai-tai Books)