Fiction
January 2020
The Illusionist on the Skywalk (Sean Chuang)
by Wu Ming-Yi, Sean Chuang
* 2020 Japan International Manga Award (Silver)* 2020 Golden Comic Award* French, Japanese, and Korean rights have been sold for the original novel and a TV series is soon to be released. Man Booker prize nominee Wu Ming-Yi’s much-loved collection of nostalgic short stories, as a graphic novel. Let the artists whisk you back to Taipei of the 1980s, to the long-gone Chunghwa Market Bazaar and a world of magical memories. In 1980s Taipei, the Chunghwa Market Bazaar was home to hardware stores, snack stalls, record shops, tailors, locksmiths and seal-carvers – if you needed it, you could find it here. Any resident of Taipei at the time will have precious memories of the eight buildings that formed the market. And linking those buildings, they will remember, was a skywalk. And perhaps one day, on the skywalk, they saw an illusionist. The illusionist on the skywalk has many tricks. He can magic up a copy of a key, make the safety railing disappear, and have a papercut man stand up and dance. Children cluster round, trying to spot the trick to his tricks. Years later, those children are grown and the market is gone, and all that is left is stories steeped in magic: The elevator to the 99th floor that turns you invisible, the stone lion that walks into your dreams and joins you for a stroll, the drawing of a goldfish which comes to life and swims around its bowl (although if you look closely, you can see through it) and a curiously clever cat which keeps lonely old folk company. Adapted from a collection of short stories by Taiwan’s best-known writer, Wu Ming-Yi, this graphic novel has been created by two artists, each drawing four stories from the lives of those children who watched the illusionist on the skywalk. These are tales of adventure and setback, of love and death – of all that we must face as we grow up, told in a blend of nostalgia and magical realism. Let Wu Ming-Yi’s words and the art of Sean Chuang and Ruan Guang-Ming carry you back to 1980s Taipei.
