* 2025 Taipei Book Fair Award

Award-winning historical fiction author Chu He-Chih’s latest effort interweaves the perspectives of different social and ethnic groups about the crash of a plane in the mountains above their town. The subsequent search and rescue effort spotlights the internecine fractures gripping Taiwan at the close of the Second World War.

After a US bomber carrying liberated POWs crashes in southeast Taiwan’s Sancha (Hainsaran) Mountains eight days after the formal end of wartime hostilities in 1945, a search-and-rescue party organized by the Japanese police chief in a nearby village discovers all twenty-five aboard had perished. Informed the Americans want the bodies recovered and returned home, he assembles a motley team of seventy villagers to trek up again to the crash site. However, a typhoon arrives before they reach their objective, forcing them to turn back and killing twenty-six in the process. The task was finally completed in a second attempt by a new team several weeks later.

Chu He-Chih, building on the foundation of this historical event, creates a trio of protagonists of different social and ethnic backgrounds to explore what may have motivated these villagers to undertake such a daring and dangerous mission.

Officer Kido Yasohachi, one of the leaders on the search team, has lived in Taiwan over half of his life. Although long taken to deriding his adopted home as a “wild and savage waste”, since his country’s surrender, he finds himself unable to accept the idea of leaving. Another in the trio, local Chinese businessman Pan Ming-Kun, can’t get over that Kido, a long-time business acquaintance, has invited him on such an important mission. Haisul, an indigenous Bunun tribesman Kido had helped as a boy, serves as the team’s guide. Having heard stories of the mountains from his grandfather all his life, he is now eager to experience the realm of his ancestors for himself.

This story of the travails endured by a team of Japanese, Chinese, and indigenous Taiwanese transforms a largely forgotten footnote in history into a window on Taiwan society in upheaval at the end of the Second World War. The author encapsulates this epochal time in history through the eyes of each ethnic group and, through literature, breathes life again into souls now long lost to the sands of time, giving voice to their internal struggles and everyday joys and sorrows.