On October 27, 1930, during a sports meet at Musha Elementary School on an aboriginal reservation in the mountains of Taiwan, a bloody uprising occurred unlike anything Japan had experienced in its colonial history. Before noon, the Atayal tribe had slain one hundred and thirty-four Japanese in a headhunting ritual. The Japanese responded with a militia of three thousand, heavy artillery, airplanes, and internationally banned poisonous gas, bringing the tribe to the brink of genocide.
Nearly seventy years later, Chen Guocheng, a writer known as Wu He, or "Dancing Crane," investigated the long forgotten Musha Incident to search for any survivors and their descendants. The result is Wu He's novel Remains of Life, which imagines the impetus behind this disturbing event and questions its legitimacy and accuracy. In his novel, Wu He walks a tightrope between the primitive and the civilized, beauty and violence, fact and fiction.His is a one-of-a-kind work and a milestone in Chinese literature, winning nearly every major national literary award upon its publication in Taiwan, including the Taipei Creative Writing Award for Literature, the China Times's Ten Best Books of the Year Award, the United Daily Readers's Choice Award, Ming Pao's Ten Best Books of the Year Award, and the Kingstone Award for the Most Influential Book of the Year.
