Introduction
O
n October 27, 1930, during an annual sports meet held at the Musha Elementary School on an aboriginal reservation deep in the mountains of central Taiwan, there occurred a bloody uprising unlike anything Japan had ever witnessed in its colonial history. Just as the Japanese national anthem was being played, members of six Atayal tribal villages, led by the Mhebu chief Mona Rudao, descended upon the school sports field and commenced their attack. Before noon the Atayal tribe had summarily slain 134 Japanese in a headhunting ritual that shook Japan’s colonial empire to its core. The Japanese responded to what would later become known as the “Musha Incident”1 with a militia of three thousand, heavy artillery, airplanes, and internationally banned poisonous gas. The Atayal of Musha were brought to the brink of genocide. Nearly seventy years later, Chen Guocheng—a writer best known by his poetic pen name, Wu He, or “Dancing Crane”—traveled to Qingliu (Alang Gluban) to investigate the long forgotten Musha Incident and search for the “remains of life”—the survivors of the incident and their descendants. Qingliu is the current name of the indigenous reservation once known as Riverisle, or Chuanzhongdao. Named after the Japanese city of Kawanakajima, Riverisle is a small,
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idyllic community nestled between several mountains and streams in central Taiwan forty kilometers from Musha. It is also the site where the Atayal survivors of the Musha Incident were forcibly exiled after the Japanese suppressed the uprising of 1930. Living on this small reservation on and off over a span of two years during the late 1990s, Wu He, under the guise of a “researcher,” began to explore the impetus behind this disturbing historical event and question the legitimacy and accuracy surrounding the event itself as well as the ways it has been rendered by historians and commemorated by politicians. In his novel Remains of Life (Yu sheng, 1999), Wu He gradually introduces a cast of characters who live in this place of exile: Girl, a former prostitute with a taste for Chopin; Drifter, Girl’s little brother, who spends his days riding around the reservation on his motor scooter; Mr. Miyamoto, an older man infatuated with the spirit of the samurai; Bakan, the reservation’s well-educated indigenous rights leader; Deformo, a stuttering young man who idles away his days going for long walks; Nun, who set up a makeshift Buddhist temple in a shipping container. Their stories interact with tales of the historical figures from the 1930 Musha Incident: Mona Rudao, the Mhebu tribal leader who took his own life in the aftermath of the uprising; his daughter Mahong Mona, who lived out the rest of her life in the traumatic shadows of the incident; and Obin Tado, the widow of Hanaoka Jirō, one of the central figures in the history of the Musha Incident. Along the way, Wu He offers his own ruminations and ramblings, meditations and musings that blur the line between history and fantasy, the primitive and the civilized, beauty and violence, fact and fiction. The result is a powerful and disturbing literary voyage into perhaps the darkest chapter of Taiwan’s colonial history. This one-of-a-kind work was a milestone in Chinese literature that marked the arrival of a major voice on the Sinophone literary scene. Although Wu He had begun publishing short stories in the 1970s, for much of the 1980s he lived a life of seclusion, and he did not release his writings
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from this period until much later. Only in the late 1990s did Wu He reemerge on the Taiwan literary world with a string of novels and short story collections that captured the attention of readers and critics. One after another, Wu He released two collections of short fiction, Digging for Bones (Shigu, 1995) and The Sea at Seventeen (Shiqi sui de hai, 1997), and a novel, Meditative Thoughts on A Bang and Kadresengane (Sisuo Abang Kalusi, 1997). But even this series of works could not prepare readers for his masterful 1999 novel Remains of Life. Upon its publication in Taiwan, the novel won virtually every major national literary award, including the Taipei Creative Writing Award for Literature, the China Times Ten Best Books of the Year Award, the United Daily Readers’ Choice Award, Ming Pao’s Ten Best Books of the Year Award, and the Kingstone Award for Most Influential Book of the Year. Wu He’s work has been the focus of numerous scholarly articles, book chapters, and several full-length academic monographs. In 2011 the French translation of Remains of Life was published by Actes Sud under the title Les Survivants and received great critical acclaim. Besides its impact as a work of literature, Remains of Life also helped trigger a major reevaluation of the Musha Incident in contemporary Taiwan history and popular culture. At the time of its publication, there were only a handful of books in print about the Musha Incident, but within a few years dozens of new books have appeared, including oral histories, historical biographies, graphic novels, and children’s books, which have collectively reintroduced the Musha Incident into mainstream Taiwanese popular culture. The extent to which this once marginalized historical trauma has moved to the center of Taiwan pop culture can best be demonstrated by the 2005 release of Taiwan black metal band Chthonic’s (Shanling) full-length concept album entitled Seediq Bale (Saideke Balai), which transformed the Musha Incident into the historical backdrop for a rock opera, and the 2011 release of director Wei Te-sheng’s (Wei Desheng) twopart motion picture Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (Saideke
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Balai), which became one of the most successful fi lms in Taiwan box-office history. In 2013 another fi lm about the Musha Incident, a documentary directed by Tang Shaing-Chu (Tang Xiangzhu) entitled Pusu Qhuni, actually borrowed the same Chinese title as Wu He’s novel, Yu sheng, or the “Remains of Life.” Remains of Life may have played a crucial role in resurrecting society’s collective memory of the Musha Incident, and Wu He’s work also functions as an uncompromising literary statement, a novel-asmanifesto that challenges traditional historical writing, ethical assumptions, and literary conventions. Remains of Life stands out for several reasons. As one of the first contemporary literary works to address the scars left by the Musha Incident and its brutal suppression, the novel stimulated a renewed dialogue and cultural debate about the incident in Taiwan. After centuries of oppression, the indigenous peoples of Taiwan remain largely marginalized, and Remains of Life is one of the few literary works by an ethnic Chinese writer to address the plight of the island’s original occupants under both the Japanese colonizers and the Nationalist regime. With extensive descriptions of the natural environment and ruminations on environmental destruction, the novel can also be seen as making an important contribution to Taiwan’s burgeoning body of eco-literature. But perhaps most incredible is the way that Wu He seamlessly merges heavy themes like historical memory, state violence, and environmental devastation with equal bits of irony and humor. It is Wu He’s ability to effortlessly shift gears from a mood of melancholic loss to subversive irony to deep reflection to maniacal ramblings that gives his novel such a distinct and instantly recognizable voice. Remains of Life is not only bold in terms of its subject matter and social engagement but also noteworthy as a work of brilliant literature. Continuing the tradition of the great stream-of-consciousness novels like James Joyce’s Ulysses and José Saramago’s The Cave, Wu He’s novel presents a major breakthrough in structure, syntax, and
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linguistic experimentation. Unprecedented in the Chinese literary world, Remains of Life contains no paragraph divisions and employs only a few dozen periods over the course of its sprawling narrative; it has been hailed as an important linguistic milestone. Innovation aside, Remains of Life does present real challenges for Englishlanguage readers who approach the book: the subject is a historical massacre from 1930 that is virtually unknown in the West; the setting is a indigenous reservation during the Japanese colonial era in Taiwan with a unique history and cultural background; and then there are the novel’s unforgivingly experimental stream-of-consciousness style (no paragraph breaks, only a handful of periods, and unorthodox use of commas and other punctuation marks) and the narrative itself, which slips back and forth between philosophical musings (about history, the nature of civilization, and violence), observations about the people the author meets on the reservation, his investigations into the Musha Incident, and wild, magical, fantastical passages where the author’s imagination takes over. The stream-of-consciousness form that dominates is not mere embellishment of an experimental literary sensibility, but a structural device meticulously designed, with each period marking a distinct shift in theme and focus. There are three themes the author explores in the novel, and each sentence break marks the transition from one theme to the next. In the afterword, Wu He explains the three themes that Remains of Life sets out to investigate: 1) “the legitimacy and justification behind Mona Rudao launching the ‘Musha Incident.’ In addition to the ‘Second Musha Incident’”; 2) “the Quest of Girl, who was my nextdoor neighbor during my time staying on the reservation”; and 3) “the Remains of Life that I visited and observed while on the reservation.” These three items reveal the novel’s circular A-B-C structure, which continues for the duration. In addition, the fractured narrative can be seen as a direct reflection and commentary on the fractured characters the narrator encounters as they live out the “remains of
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their lives” in the shadow of unspeakable atrocity and violence. Gradually the novel reveals the societal and political structures by which yesterday’s colonial violence has been transformed into today’s economic exploitation and environmental degradation. While Wu He has described the writing process of this novel as akin to an unrestrained release of words committed to paper in a rather short time span with minimal revision, the translation process was a much slower and more arduous undertaking. Spanning more than a decade, the translation was hindered by several starts and stops, interrupted by other projects, and haunted by the myriad challenges that the original novel presented, including issues like: the romanization of indigenous names, the use of dialects, the novel’s unconventional grammar, decoding original terms coined by the author, and deciphering his sometimes nonsensical ramblings. Because of the nature and number of these challenges, there was often a temptation to “simplify” things: to add conjunctions to help the narrative flow, to sneak in commas to break up long clauses, to clarify convoluted structures by making the inner meaning more legible. Ultimately, however, I decided against half-measures. Th is is a work of experimental fiction, and I wanted passages that were challenging or just plain weird in the original to feel just as challenging or weird in translation.2 Some of the other unique features of the novel include the author’s employment of proper nouns for place names and character names. Th roughout the book, Wu He almost never uses the word “Taiwan,” instead opting for “island nation” (dao guo), a choice that carries direct political undertones. Likewise, he rarely refers to Chinese people or Taiwanese people (Zhongguo ren or Taiwan ren), but instead to “People from the Plains” ( pingdi ren). “Japanese” (Riben ren) also rarely appears, being replaced by the “Rulers” (tongzhi zhe). And perhaps most confusing for some readers, the names by which some of the main characters are referred to actually shift and transform over the course of the narrative. For instance, one character is introduced
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as Weirdo ( Qi ren) but later referred to as Deformo ( Ji ren), Girl (Guniang) is referred to for a time as Meimei, Old Wolf (Lao lang) is also referred to as Daya Mona and Little Daya (Lao Daya), Danafu alternately appears as Nafafu and Nafu, and Mr. Miyamoto is later called Samurai. While making these names consistent and using standard terms to refer to “the Chinese,” “the Japanese,” “Taiwan,” and other names would make the novel more legible to English readers, in almost all cases I have instead opted to preserve the author’s original word choice. This translation of Remains of Life marks the English-language debut of one of the most brilliant, imaginative, and challenging writers to emerge from East Asia in many years. Focusing on an actual historical incident little known in the West, Wu He’s novel serves as an important addition to our understanding of both Japan’s colonial project and the plight of Taiwan’s aboriginal people, a group whose voice has too often been drowned under the tides of history and hegemony. At the same time, Remains of Life stands unique in its vision and depth, humor and humanism, beauty and strangeness.
| Over the course of this extended translation process, I have incurred the debt of many colleagues, friends, and family members. I would like to thank foremost the author, Wu He, for his patience and generosity, and for entrusting me with this special book. Thanks to my family, Suk-Young Kim, Miles Berry, Naima Berry, and Beverly St. John, John and Abby Berry, and John Berry II, for their love and support. Jennifer Crewe at Columbia University Press has offered her unwavering support of this project ever since I first pitched it to her many years ago; it is a rare luxury to have an editor willing to extend
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the degree of patience and support that she has shown me. Special thanks to Leslie Kriesel for careful and sensitive handling of this difficult text, and to the wonderful team at CUP. Thanks also to Candy Lin, Tzu-i Chuang Mullinax, Sonny Chen, Esther Lin, John Nathan, Michael Emmerich, my former colleagues and students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and my current colleagues and students at UCLA. Special thanks to Professor Darryl Sterk of National Taiwan University, Professor Letty Chen, and the external readers who went above and beyond the call of duty in providing detailed comments and suggestions on this manuscript. I and future readers of this book are indebted to the sensitivity, care, and professionalism they brought to the task of reviewing this difficult text. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts, which supported this project with a Translation Grant. Thanks to Professor K. C. Tu, who published an early excerpt in Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series. Professor David Der-wei Wang has long been a champion of this novel. Not only has he published extensively on Remains of Life, but he also was the series editor of the original Chineselanguage edition and is now series editor for this English translation. Over the years, he has been a great supporter of Chinese literature and Chinese literary studies and on a personal level, I am fortunate to call him a mentor and friend. It is with humbleness and gratitude that I dedicate this translation to Professor David Der-wei Wang, a model scholar, teacher, and friend. M. B. Goleta, CA