Khu Eng-han’s “Koen”：A Taiwanese Attempt to Depict Taiwan in Japanese in the 1950s

Born in colonial Taiwan in 1924, Khu Eng-han fled to Hong Kong in the late 1940s and settled in postwar Japan in 1954. Through his postwar Japanese-language works about Taiwanese lives across imperial and postwar regimes, Khu became the first non-Japanese national to win the Naoki Prize. To examine how a foreign writer vividly narrates Taiwanese experience while gaining literary recognition, this paper revisits Khu’s “Koen” (1955), a work largely overlooked in existing scholarship. First, it analyzes the novel’s depiction of Taiwan’s landscape, tracing Khu’s poetry and prose poems of the 1940s while highlighting his renewed effort to bind place to local life and the interior worlds of Taiwanese inhabitants. The paper then examines the shifting funerary practices described in this text as an index of social transformation, the protagonist’s son as a biographically resonant figure, and its folk-legend imagery as an oblique political subtext, arguing that these motifs collectively register Taiwan’s social transformation in the first half of the twentieth century indirectly and through allusion. Finally, the paper interprets the novel’s fractured narration as formalizing the fragmentation of memory and a societal breakdown of communication, thereby illuminating the predicament of Taiwanese intellectuals during the postwar political turmoil. Ultimately, this paper repositions “Koen” as a pivotal text for reassessing Khu’s mid-1950s literary experimentation in form and representation.