Sea Breeze Hotel

The Sea Breeze Club

What we arrive at is what we once left, and what we lose is what we wanted to pursue.

A Taroko boy chasing a white dog and a Han Chinese girl running away from home to avoid being sold by her father each entered the cave from different villages—unbeknownst to them, they had actually entered the giant's "inner bottom" (lāi-tué).

A crab-eating mongoose, whose leg was severed by a trapper's claws, took refuge beneath a giant's eyelashes and gradually recovered. The surviving three-legged crab-eating mongoose, while moving between the giant and the tribe, discovered some secrets.

Nestled among the mountains on the eastern side of the island is Knibu, also known as Haifeng Village. In this small village, inhabited at different times by indigenous and Han Chinese, ancestors, and even God, a woman stands at the entrance of Sea Breeze Karaoke, holding her young daughter. Meanwhile, on the other side of the village, machinery is set up on the hillside, ready to carve a vertical well in the mountain and extract cement.

In this valley village, where two great tectonic plates meet, myth and humanity meet, birth and death meet, the people gathered here by fate, one eye on the mountain, the other on the sea - what will they decide?

Wu Mingyi says, "This novel isn't constructed from historical sites. Of course, its materials are so authentic that it's not entirely dreamlike. I intentionally distanced it from reality, hoping readers would enjoy the narrative time and space within it and form their own interpretations." The novel's plot, characters, and settings may correspond to reality, or they may be dreamlike, making it impossible to follow a straight path. The story's journey isn't spring, summer, autumn, or winter, but may also be in a season that's neither spring, summer, autumn, nor winter. Every person, every event, every mountain, every stream, and every building is a node, a foldable arrow, leading the novel's characters, and us, the readers, to the future and the unknown cave's exit.

Seven years after "The Stolen Bicycle," Wu Mingyi brings readers this novel. When you open the pages, perhaps it is also the beginning of a new season for the author.

* Wu Ming-yi's latest novel follows "The Man with Compound Eyes," which won the Prix du Livre Insulaire (France), was selected for the Books at Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival) in Germany, and was a candidate for the overseas feature film category of the Seiun Awards Nominees in Japan; and "The Bicycle Thief," which was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in the UK.

2023-06-27

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