When taxi driver Wu Shih-sheng’s wife, Hsiang-ying, dies under mysterious circumstances after hearing a strange voice, Shih-sheng embarks on a dangerous adventure that leads him from the familiar city streets of Taipei to the boiling hot water baths and treacherous peaks of Mount Jade. There, he confronts, or, more precisely, is terrorized by Minako, who appears to be the ghost of a Japanese girl who, years ago, disappeared on Mount Jade. Minako, though, didn’t die and turned up unharmed the next day. Strangely, she was delivered straight to Japanese officials by the local Bunun people, despite the existing tensions between the indigenous group and their Japanese colonizers. And so begins a haunting tale where spirits have the power to shatter glass, radios are a medium through which supernatural forces communicate, and illusions drive people to madness.  

Despite the harsh trials he endures, Shih-sheng is by no means a dashing hero, but instead a deeply flawed and faltering man whose relationships have fallen apart, largely due to his own behavior. Once arrogant and upwardly mobile, Shih-sheng is unable to cope healthily with misfortunes and ages into a bitter man who drinks heavily, beats his wife, and speaks neither to his father nor to his daughter. And yet there are times when you can’t help but root for him, or at least hope that he escapes safely to complain and drink another day. His character doesn’t undergo a complete transformation from degenerate to reformed, but his wife’s demise undoubtedly impacts him. There are moments of clarity when Shih-sheng realizes all the things Hsiang-ying did—working menial jobs, staying beside him despite his ingratitude and temper, cooking home meals—and her death forces him to reflect on his treatment of her, and the choices he made that led him to his present state. Furthermore, his ensuing investigation into her death, in the face of others’ disbelief, gives him a clear purpose that he has been sorely missing and compels him to reconnect with those he previously rejected.

While delivering nail-biting terror, Whisper doesn’t shy away from real world topics; it delves into Taiwan’s rocky history of colonialism and hybrid identities, which, beyond garnering a mere passing mention, are integral to the story. The setting of some of the book’s most dramatic episodes, Mount Jade, originally belonged to the Bunun people. But Mount Jade was colonized by the Japanese and later the Taiwanese government. Whisper highlights the continued oppression and discrimination faced by indigenous people through the character Tsu-tsu, a psychiatric patient who shares a room with Hsiang-ying on the night of the latter’s brutal death. Tsu-tsu is a Bunum woman who has “been in and out of psychiatric care” for years since she was sent to a brothel when she was only 12. Her experience reflects that “of the indigenous child prostitutes [who] end up in the mental health system.” 

Language is also pivotal to characters’ identities and to the plot. Minako sings songs to her targets “mostly in Taiwanese, some in Japanese.” Mount Jade is “Mount Niitaka to the Japanese, pronounced Xingao in Chinese.” As a child, Shih-sheng mainly spoke Japanese at home since his father had grown up in Japanese-occupied China. Despite his insistence in being “Taiwanese-born and bred,” Shih-sheng faces prejudice for his thickly accented Taiwanese and still has “to make an effort with the language… to fit in.”

The novel blurs Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese folklore together into a dizzying mix that is as diverse as human identities. In a side-plot, Shih-sheng’s sister-in-law’s perfect on paper lifestyle implodes when she discovers that her businessman husband has been cheating on her. Desperate to win back her husband and punish his mistress, she enlists the help of xiaogui, a fetus demon that feeds on human blood and can enslave other spirits. And the Bunun people believe Minako to be a moxina, a child-like ghost that hides in the forest. 

Whisper is an engrossing page-turner with all the elements of horror novels, detective stories, and historical fiction. The writing, translated from Chinese by Roddy Flagg, is simple, but emotionally poignant and unsettlingly gruesome as the plot demands at times. I’d never read Taiwanese literature prior to this book (shame on me!), but I will be reading more from that side of the Pacific Ocean, and Chang Yu-Ko is definitely an author to look out for. In Whisper, readers struggle alongside Shih-sheng; all trying and failing to differentiate between the tangible and the hallucinatory. The tragic events that occurred on Mount Jade in 1932 are finally being brought to light, yet one can’t help but wonder whether the present can rectify the misunderstandings of the past.