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Under martial law, most memories about the Japanese Period (1895-1945) had to comply with the KMT's Chinese nationalist narrative and its anti-Japan or Japanbashing discourse in order to get published. Seeing Taiwanese as enslaved by Japanese colonialism, the KMT repressed and negated memories about the Japanese Period; consequently, the return of the repressed assumed different aspects in different times in the post-war era: anti-Japan mostly with some delineations of identity conflict from the 1970s to the late 1990s, and pro-Japan in juxtaposition with anti-Japan and split identity since the late 1990s. This paper deals with the re-memory of the Japanese Period in recent fiction by studying as an instance the complicated relationship between counter-memory, identity formation, and hybridity in Li Ang 李昂's shortstory collection, Passion Foods《鴛鴦春膳》, and Wu Ming-yi 吳明益's novel, Routes in the Dream《睡眠的航線》. All set in the 1990s, these works explore rememories of the Japanese Period in comparison with post-war memories under the KMT. I will discuss the following questions: How does counter-memory entail politics of national identity? How does cultural hybridity brought about by Japanese colonial modernity affect identity formation? Does it problematize or complicate identity? How does counter-memory deploy hybridity as a basis for new politics of national identity? I maintain that both books transmute the sadness of counter-memory into a recognition that the cultural hybridity formed during the Japanese Period serves as a basis of Taiwanese identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical memory fiction has flourished ever since the lifting of martial law in Taiwan. Some of these fictions excavate multi-ethnic, transnational experiences in relation to colonialisms, exploring ethnic experiences beyond stereotypes and debunking monolithic national imagination, thereby opening up possibilities for an alternative historical imagination. This article deals with the alternative historical imagination in Shih Shu-ching's Dust before the Wind, with a special focus on its representation of issues that had rarely been dealt with before in Taiwanese literature, such as the “enterprise of governing the savages,” the Taroko Battle, the ethnic relationships in Hualien under Japanese rule, Japanese immigrant villages, and postwar Japanese legacy. I argue that the novel presents an intricate re-vision of Japanese colonialism and Taiwan's postcoloniality by contrapuntally portraying three ethnic groups in eastern Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule and depicting post-war Japanese legacy, as well as by re-exploring the identity problems triggered by assimilation, imperialization, decolonization, and indigenization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]