Books Like Taiwan Travelogue: Sapphic Historical Fiction and Baihe to Read Next

If you loved Taiwan Travelogue, read The Empress of Salt and Fortune next for a servant's devotion told through a frame story, then Butter for food and obsession between two women, and The Confessions of Frannie Langton for love across a mistress-and-servant divide.

That is the short answer. The longer one depends on which part of Yáng Shuāng-zǐ's novel stayed with you. In 1938 a Japanese novelist, Aoyama Chizuko, spends a year touring colonial Taiwan with a Taiwanese interpreter, Chizuru. She wants closeness. Chizuru keeps a careful distance, because one of them belongs to the empire that rules the island and the other is paid to serve her. Each of the twelve chapters is named after a dish. And the whole book poses as a translation of a 1954 Japanese novel, wrapped in fictional prefaces, notes and afterwords that don't always agree with the story they surround. Lin King's English edition then adds a real translator's note on top.

When readers finish it, they usually want one of four things again: an unspoken pull between two women across a power gap, colonial-era Taiwan, the food, or the editor games. Hardly anything does all four, so the picks below are grouped by what they deliver.

Not everyone loves the scaffolding. The Publishers Weekly reviewer warned that patience might wear thin by the fourth afterword, and the Asian Review of Books reports that some Taiwanese buyers of the 2020 original took it for a genuine 1930s travelogue and accused the publisher of deceit. It won anyway: the 2024 US National Book Award for Translated Literature, then the 2026 International Booker Prize, announced on 19 May 2026, the first win for a book translated from Mandarin.

Is it a love story? Graywolf's own catalogue copy calls it one, about love between two women. Taiwanese coverage files it under historical baihe (百合, bǎihé, Chinese girls' love; what is baihe? has the background). Some reviewers, though, feel the romance barely registers at all. That doubt is part of the pleasure, so every pick below says plainly whether its central bond is openly romantic or stays unnamed.

More by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

In English, there isn't any yet (as of October 2026). Her earlier novels, including Huā Kāi Shí Jié (花開時節), are set in the same Japanese-era Taiwan, and we found no English edition of any of them. Taiwan Travelogue is also the one literary novel on our list of every official English baihe novel. The rest of that shelf is licensed web fiction, which is a very different read.

Translated fiction from Taiwan and Japan

Notes of a Crocodile — Qiu Miaojin (1994; English 2017)

Lazi, a lesbian student at a top Taipei university in the late 1980s, falls hard and hopelessly for an older woman, Shui Ling. The book is built from diary entries, vignettes, letters and satire, and NYRB Classics published Bonnie Huie's translation. Nothing here is unspoken: Lazi names what she is on almost every page. It shares the Taiwanese setting and the feel of a document you weren't supposed to read, not the period. Qiu's Last Words from Montmartre (NYRB, 2014), letters written from Paris to a lover in Taipei, is the follow-up, and the bleaker of the two. Qiu died in Paris in 1995, at twenty-six.

Butter — Asako Yuzuki (2017; English 2024)

A magazine journalist, Rika Machida, keeps visiting Manako Kajii, a cook jailed over the deaths of three lonely men she fed. She asks for Kajii's beef stew recipe, and the meals take over from there. Polly Barton translated it for 4th Estate and Ecco, and the case is loosely based on a real one. This is not a romance. It is a lopsided, intimate bond between two women, played out through meals, and it is the best pick here if the food chapters were your favourite part of Taiwan Travelogue.

Two women divided by class, empire or language

The Empress of Salt and Fortune — Nghi Vo (2020)

A travelling cleric, Chih, catalogues an abandoned palace, and an old woman named Rabbit tells the story behind each object. Long ago her parents sold her to the palace, and she served In-yo, a northern princess married into the empire and later exiled. Tordotcom published it as a short novella. As in Taiwan Travelogue, someone is managing the record. The devotion between servant and empress is the emotional centre, but it stays intimate and unnamed, and Rabbit's one on-page affair is with a man. Read it for the frame and the loyalty, not for a kiss.

The Confessions of Frannie Langton — Sara Collins (2019)

London, 1826. Frannie, born enslaved on a Jamaican plantation and taught to read there, is on trial for murdering her employers, George and Marguerite Benham. She can't remember the night, so she writes out her life for her lawyer. Her love for Marguerite, a French-born wife numbed by laudanum, is openly romantic and is the heart of the book. Expect slavery, sexual abuse and the "race science" of the period on the page. That's heavy, but it handles the master-servant power gap more directly than anything else here.

The Mercies — Kiran Millwood Hargrave (2020)

In 1617 a storm drowns almost every man in Vardø, an Arctic fishing village in Norway. A Scottish witch-hunter arrives to take charge, and he brings a young wife, Ursa, who isn't used to such hard living. She hires Maren, a local woman of twenty, to teach her, and the two are drawn together as the witch trials close in. The love between them is sapphic, and it builds slowly. It is grim, built on real trials, and the whole book runs on the gap between the commissioner's wife and an islander.

The Paying Guests — Sarah Waters (2014)

It's 1922, in Camberwell, south London. Frances Wray and her mother, genteel and short of money, take in a young married couple of the "clerk class" as lodgers. Frances and Lilian Barber start an affair. Then the book turns into a crime novel. The class gap runs backwards here, with the poorer household as the posher one, and the sex scenes are frank, so this is the hottest book on the list.

The Price of Salt — Patricia Highsmith (1952)

Therese Belivet, a young would-be stage designer stuck behind a department-store counter at Christmas, helps a wealthy suburban woman, Carol Aird, order a gift for her daughter. Carol is in the middle of an ugly divorce, and what follows is a courtship carried on mostly in glances and things left unsaid, until it isn't. Highsmith published it under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. It became famous for something rare in lesbian fiction of its era: a hopeful ending. If the slow, unspoken half of Taiwan Travelogue is what you want, start here.

Public-domain classics, free on NovelMyth

Carmilla — J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1872)

Carmilla is free on NovelMyth, and it may be the closest classic match for the frame. It opens with an unnamed editor presenting a narrative from Doctor Hesselius's papers, and admitting that the woman who wrote it has died. Laura, nineteen and lonely in a Styrian castle, then tells the story of a beautiful guest who is far too attached to her. This is gothic horror, though. Carmilla is a predator, and the intimacy is meant to frighten.

Regiment of Women — Clemence Dane (1917)

The power gap is the entire plot in Regiment of Women, free on NovelMyth. Chapter one sets it up at a girls' school: Clare Hartill, the brilliant senior mistress who enjoys baiting her colleagues, notices a new eighteen-year-old teacher, Alwynne Durand. Clare's hold on Alwynne becomes possessive and controlling, and a pupil pays for it. Dane doesn't write it as a romance, and she steers Alwynne toward a man at the end.

The Well of Loneliness — Radclyffe Hall (1928)

The Well of Loneliness, free on NovelMyth, comes wrapped in its own paratext. A commentary by Havelock Ellis opens the book, then an author's note says Stephen's wartime ambulance unit never existed. Chapter one belongs to her parents, who were sure they were having a son. The love story with Mary Llewellyn comes much later, and it is open where Taiwan Travelogue is guarded. Britain banned the book in 1928.

FAQ

Is Taiwan Travelogue a romance?

Not in the genre sense. It's a literary novel about desire between two women, shaped by colonial rule, and critics disagree about how romantic it gets. We won't spoil the ending. The afterwords are worth reading closely.

Is Taiwan Travelogue considered baihe?

In Taiwan, yes. The author has said this is the book that made the label "historical baihe" stick. Readers who use baihe to mean Chinese web serials may disagree, because it reads nothing like one.

Which book here is closest overall?

For the mood, it's The Price of Salt. For the power gap and the frame, try The Empress of Salt and Fortune. For food, Butter. None of them does all four, which is a fair sign of how unusual Taiwan Travelogue is.