Panoramic Possession: The Colonial Railway and the Limits of Sight in Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue (2020; trans. Lin King, 2024) is often discussed through food, translation, and colonial intimacy, while little sustained Anglophone criticism has examined the railway that structures Aoyama Chizuko’s 1938 lecture tour. This essay argues that railway travel produces and delimits Aoyama’s knowledge of Taiwan by rendering colonial space continuously and pleasurably accessible. Reading the novel’s train scenes alongside Taiwan’s western trunk railway, the Alishan logging railway, and the earthquake-damaged Gyōtōhei Bridge, this essay defines panoramic possession as a mobile colonial optic operating through two linked mechanisms: nonrecognition, by which what Aoyama does not know to seek remains unregistered even when visible, and aesthetic assimilation, by which logging, reconstruction, and labor are absorbed into scenery, resilience, and imperial achievement. Against the train window, the novel places Wáng Chiēn-hò’s charts, timetables, and memories of freight, which disclose the logistical knowledge and differently recognized labor that underwrite Aoyama’s apparently effortless travel. This infrastructural asymmetry complicates accounts that emphasize translation’s identity-unsettling and historically generative potential. The final chapter, however, juxtaposes Aoyama’s inability to know where a departing train is headed with the women’s shared fruit ice, leaving epistemic limitation and provisional intimacy unresolved beside one another.