About This Issue
In dreams of distant lands, the light is always dim. Sometimes the backdrop is an island stirred by monsoon winds, the sky heavy with impending thunder; sometimes an unreachable harbor; sometimes mountains and forests, gunfire ringing out across endless bramble paths. In such times, people of different bloodlines and languages often dream the same dreams.
A Huai Army memorial, its inscriptions long faded, stands alone in a corner of a museum—a witness to the first Han-aboriginal conflicts in Taiwan, and to a fate long deliberately erased. Can the wandering, ownerless souls of shrines and legends be incorporated into historical narratives through ritual and commemoration? Or do Japanese soldiers buried in foreign seas, venerated as Ying Gong and later returned home, become tales of Taiwan-Japan reconciliation? Contemporary artists, through the flight of doves, divine manifestations, and the extension of images, lightly trace paths from the aerial frontlines of the Pacific War to local temples in southern islands, traversing and landing freely.
At the end of the Pacific War, did the darkened landscapes reflect in the eyes of those who seemed to understand the world? Sixteen prisoner-of-war camps scattered across Taiwan were established under the guise of confinement; in practice, most prisoners were forced into labor and subjected to prolonged abuse. Of the more than 4,300 prisoners, roughly one-tenth died, for whom death became the only path to freedom.
Names buried with the dead in the ashes of war, camp sites repurposed over time—recent efforts, such as at the Yilan Yuanshan Machine Gun Bunker and Kaohsiung Patriotic Women’s Hall, restore war memories through preservation and research. In contrast, Taiwan’s bases of the Japanese Army’s naval expeditionary forces along the western coast remain little known.
Since the seventeenth century, fortifications such as the Keelung Battery, the Taichung Gancheng Camp and Dakeng Gunpowder Depot, and the Hualien Meilun Mountain Fortress, have been repeatedly rebuilt. Using maps, aerial photos, interviews, historical tours, and digital GIS systems, the public can now see that present-day popular spots and ordinary streets are layered atop lands once shaped by warfare, now cleared of smoke and gunpowder.
Those unawakable dreams, those fissures trapped in time, can be reimagined or reenacted through imagination or bodily practice. This is “post-external literature,” grounded in real landscapes but written with a quasi-historical, fantastical approach; it is insular literature, depicting war both distant and near, nostalgia both intimate and estranged. It is the historical backdrop in patriotic pop songs highlighting small loves, and it is the transformation captured in artworks, from ruins to leisure spaces, symbolized by the remains of the Tamsui Battery.
When the body returns to the long Ka’ao Bay defensive line, to the lingering scent of blood reminiscent of dense jungle battlefields, recording the vanished outposts, revealing bottles and insulators hidden in treacherous terrain, the dense remnants of earth trenches and stone embankments—at night, when the eternal wind stirs hair tied on the head, do the dreams of those encamped carry subtle disquiet?
War relics, and history itself, will eventually return to dust, soil to soil. Yet in the years to come, the cherry trees bloom brilliantly in the uninhabited forests.
ISBN 9772518947009 04
