Off the Beaten Path: (Post-) Colonial Travel Writings on Taiwan Faye Yuan Kleeman yË 1 Introduction: Narrating Other, Narrating Self This paper deals with an area of Taiwanese literature that is off, way off from the mainstream. In fact, in some circles it may not even qualify as ‘Taiwanese Literature’. If the term »mainstream« implies ‘common’, ‘popular’, ‘easily accessible’, and ‘commercially viable’, the current discussion gestures to a very different sphere of literary production. The language used in this body of literature is not Chinese but Japanese and the writers are Japanese authors, colonial settlers, travelers, and ex-soldiers. If Taiwanese literature can be defined as written by Taiwanese writers (a loaded term) and/or on the subject matters related to Taiwan, then the body of literature dealt with here would belong to the latter category. Focusing on the travel writing of Taiwan, my paper explores the construction of ‘Taiwan’ in the colonial and postcolonial eras by various Japanese writers and Taiwanese writers who wrote in the Japanese language. Initially, I wanted to bring in a comparative perspective by contrasting travel writings written by the native Taiwanese to those written by Japanese