Yang Kui

Who was Yang Kui?

Yang Kui 楊逵 was a prominent writer in Taiwan's Japanese colonial period. Raised in Japanese-language schools, he went to the Japanese mainland, where he experienced both persecution and acceptance, especially by Japanese communists. Under these influences he became a proletarian novelist. After the war, he was imprisoned by the Kuomintang government from 1949 to 1961. After being released from prison, he had to learn the Chinese language from his granddaughter, as Japanese had been the common language of Taiwan until the time of his imprisonment.

His most famous work is The Newspaper Man, first written in Japanese as『新聞配達夫』 and re-written in Chinese by Yang after his imprisonment, as 送報夫. Written in Japanese, it is the story of a young Taiwanese student struggling to make money as a newspaper delivery boy.