This metafictional novel follows the journey of a dedicated historian on her journey collecting, translating and editing five little-known historical documents dating from the late-nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, hoping to bring to light the voices of women from that period.

A Japanese expeditionary force dispatched to Taiwan’s remote southern cape in 1874 in reprisal for the massacre of shipwrecked Okinawan fishermen captures an injured indigenous girl. Curious about the potential of “civilizing” Taiwan’s Austronesian natives, they take her to Japan for schooling. A contemporary news illustration of her in a kimono is captioned with her adopted Japanese name – Otai. Repatriated to her home village in Taiwan, the sad news breaks just several years later of her ostracization and suicide.

A historian, inspired by Otai’s story, turns her attention to five obscure documents from the early twentieth century centering around the female experience in colonial Taiwan. One, a long essay work, follows the furtive romance of the author (a Japanese architect) and a “woman of mystery”. Next, a letter from an indigenous Taiwanese participant in the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition details the reasons why she has chosen to reject a proposal of marriage from a Japanese academician.

The last three are works of fiction. The first, written by a Japanese author caught between two cultural landscapes, centers on Taiwan’s shim-pua (child-betrothed) marriage traditions. The second, penned by an author who was once a shim-pua bride herself, narrates a young Taiwanese woman’s knotty relationship with a Japanese policeman. The final work, written by a former subject of Japanese-ruled Taiwan, learns Mandarin in the postwar era and weaves a narrative centered around the knottingly entangled, ill-starred relationships between two Taiwanese comfort women and a Taiwanese man serving in the Japanese army.

In actuality, all five documents are works of fiction. Societies colored by patriarchal norms generally leave little room for female perspectives on history, making it only natural for women’s experiences to be filtered and interpreted through the men who wrote about them. In rejecting the imperial, patriarchal mores of the time that mask the true experiences of women such as Otai, Hsieh Yi-An’s ruminations in Adorable Enemies help readers ponder and empathize with the experience of womanhood in colonial Taiwan.