A quest to discover her roots in the family’s hometown on the Pacific Coast opens the eyes of a Taiwanese-Japanese woman not only to the divide between urban and rural but also to that between older and younger generations. She watches forlornly as both life’s familiar comforts and her family’s ancestral lands slip away.

Ryoko, born to an indigenous Amis mother and Japanese father on Taiwan’s Pacific Coast, spends her teenage years in Japan. However, increasingly alienated from the ideals and expectations of Japanese society, she dreams of moving to her mother’s home village in Taiwan. Ryoko finally makes the move but finds, although surrounded by childhood friends, she is not yet ready to settle down. She slips away without warning to the city and reboots her life again with a new boyfriend.

Several years later, she again abandons urban bustle to return to her mother’s home village. But this time, her growing reputation as an internationally acclaimed artist and vocal activism against construction of a seaside resort hotel complex nearby leave many in the community wondering sanguinely whether she is now finally ready to settle down…and whether the romance with her former hometown boyfriend will ignite once more.

Author Kuei Chun Miya’s beautifully lithe prose masterfully weaves into this work the vitality of indigenous tales and traditions. The narrative sheds light onto how the area’s different ethnic communities and cultures have increasingly abandoned longstanding mutual distrust and enmity in favor of mutual concern and assistance and of standing together against injustice. As the priorities and exigencies of modern “civil society” chip away at this once-remote backwater, the individual compromises made by characters across successive generations end up, in hindsight, helping seal a lamentable fate for the overarching struggle to preserve traditional ways and values. While progress brings good as well as bad, the author invests her passion and sorrows into this work, shedding new light on life at the bleeding edge between traditional society and modernity.