Homeland in the Borderland follows Levy Hideo as he returns to

Taichung, Taiwan, for the first time in half a century. Prompted by an 

invitation to speak at Taichung’s Tunghai University, he makes the journey 

accompanied by poet Keijiro Suga, producer of the film; and Wen Yuju, former pupil and fellow author (herself a Taiwan-national writing in Japanese). Keiko Okawa’s camera captures Levy without reserve as he dares to step into the space he once called “home”, at times fumbling uneasily, at times a joyous child reborn.

Ian Hideo Levy (1950–), writing under the name Levy Hideo, is best known as the first Westerner to author literature in the Japanese language. Born to a father of Jewish and mother of Polish descent, Levy spent his early childhood in Taiwan and Hong Kong. At the time he published his debut novel in 1987, he was already respected for his English rendering of Japan’s earliest imperial poetry anthology, Man’yōshū (The Ten Thousand Leaves, 1981), for which he won the National Book Award for Translation the following year. After the success of his first novel, A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard, Levy left a tenured position at Stanford University and the English language behind to focus on a writing career in Japanese. In his subsequent novels, essays and travel writing, including Akutagawa Prize nominated short story Tiananmen (1996), he has continued to probe previously accepted norms and generalizations relating to identity formation, nationality, and what it means to be a writer of Japanese literature.