After seven years, Wu Mingyi brings readers his latest novel
2023 Openbook Good Book Award - Chinese Book of the Year
We arrive at what we once left.
What we lose is what we pursue.
A Taroko boy chasing a white dog,
A Han girl who ran away from home because she didn't want to be sold by her father,
They entered the cave from different villages - they didn't know,
What he entered was the "inner bottom" (lāi-tué) of the giant.
A crab-eating mongoose with its leg cut off by a trap.
With his life hanging by a thread, he hid under the giant's eyelashes.
The surviving three-legged crab-eating mongoose,
While traveling between giants and tribes, some secrets were discovered.
Knibu/Haifeng Village is located in the mountains of the island.
The aborigines, the Han people, the ancestors and the gods migrated here.
A woman holding her daughter stood at the entrance of "Sea Breeze Karaoke";
On the other side of the mountainside of the village,
Preparations are underway to dig a vertical shaft out of the mountain, and the equipment for extracting cement has been set up.
In this valley village where mythology and the human world meet,
Everyone who has gathered here because of fate,
With one eye on the mountains and one eye on the sea, what will their decision be?
The cave exit leading to the future and the unknown
This novel is not constructed using historical scenes.
Of course, its building materials are so real that it is not all a dream.
I just deliberately kept it away from reality.
I hope readers enjoy the narrative time and space in the novel.
Then form your own ideas.
——Wu Mingyi
The plot, characters, and scenes of the novel may correspond to reality.
Perhaps it is like a dream, making it impossible to follow the map;
The journey of the story is not spring, summer, autumn and winter,
It may also be a season that is neither spring, summer, autumn, nor winter.
Everyone, everything, every mountain,
Every stream and building is a node.
A collapsible arrow.
With the characters in the novel and us as readers,
The cave exit leading to the future and the unknown.
The latest novel after The Stolen Bicycle
Won the French Prix du Livre Insulaire novel award
Selected for Books at Berlinale
Seiun Awards Nominees
Shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize
Seven years later, following "The Stolen Bicycle",
Wu Mingyi brings this novel to readers.
When you open the pages of the book,
For the author, it is also the beginning of a new season.
About the Author
Wu Mingyi
Sometimes I write, draw, photograph, and farm. He is currently a professor in the Department of Chinese Literature at National Dong Hwa University.
He has written the essay collections "The Butterfly Diary", "The Butterfly Road", "Home is So Close to the Water", and "Floating Light"; the short story collections "Closed Today", "Tiger Lord", "The Magician on the Overpass", and "The Land of Bitter Rain"; the novels "The Route of Sleep", "The Man with Compound Eyes", and "The Stolen Bicycle"; and the three-volume essay series "Liberating Nature through Writing".
His works have been translated into more than 20 languages and have won the French Prix du Livre Insulaire for novels and third place in the Japanese Honya Prize for Translation. He was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in the UK and the Emile Marie Claire in France. Guimet Prize for Asian Literature (Prix Émile Guimet de littérature asiatique), Books at Berlinale (Berlinale - Berlin International Film Festival), candidate for the overseas feature category of Japan's Seiun Awards (Seiun Awards Nominees), the best Chinese novel of the past century by Time Out Beijing, one of the top ten Chinese novels of the year by Asia Weekly, and the Hong Kong Baptist University's Dream of the Red Chamber Expert Recommendation Award.
In China, he has won the Taipei International Book Fair Novel Award, the Taiwan Literature Award for Novel, the United Daily News Literature Award, the Golden Tripod Award for Best Book of the Year, the "Kaijuan" Book of the Year, and many other annual book selections.