That the literature of Taiwan under Japanese occupation has been shunned by the canons of literary history should surprise no one. It was a shameful page in Chinese history, one that few can look upon with equanimity. Much of the literature of that period was written in Japanese by a people whose nationhood was held hostage, and, from a chauvinist standpoint, ill-fits the traditional categories of national literatures. In an age when art and politics are seen as antinomies, writing on irrepressibly political subjects in borrowed tongues, whether Japanese or the Mandarin vernacular, is found wanting in aesthetic satisfaction. And from the point of view of political requirements, few of the works laboring under colonial censorship answer the need for a rousing clarion call. Indeed, Joseph Lau, anthologist and translator of Taiwanese fiction, while resurrecting a few works of the colonial period to Western attention, warns that they make rewarding reading only from a historical perspective: as records of a people under foreign domination.' The caveat addresses a reading habit that decontextualizes writing and valorizes a disembodied art above history. A careful reading of the writings during that period reveals much that deserves attention, not only as documents of political history but as hybrid products in a particularly turbulent phase of cultural history. In a laudable effort at recovering a submerged literature which has long suffered both censorship and neglect, publishers on Taiwan have recently reissued an impressive array of writings from the colonial period.2 Their publication coincides with a resurgence of interest in establishing a local Taiwan identity within and against the dominant narrative of a unified China. At a time when demands for localization of