It is the first feature of Wang's “Taiwan Trilogy,'' which also includes Banana Paradise (香蕉天堂; 1989) and Hill of No Return (無言的山丘; 1992).
[1] The film adopts a comic tone to depict the hardships of life as colonizers in rural Taiwan at the height of WWII.
Though not an adaptation from nativist novel like Wang's acclaimed A Flower in The Raining Night (看海的日子; 1983), which is based on the namesake novel by Huang Chun Ming (黃春明), Strawman’s poor farmer family at Yilan’s Shuanglian Pi and the ridiculous journey to deliver an unexploded bomb are depicted very much in the style of Huang's nativist literature.
The two brothers A Fa and Big Mouth were second-generation tenant farmers living in rural Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule during WWII.
Life was hard and they had quite a number of children to feed and a sister who lost her mind after her newlywed husband was drafted by the Japanese and died on the battlefield.
Believing that they could be handsomely rewarded, the brothers and the local policeman decided to carry the heavy bomb all the way to the police office in the town.
The disabled Taiwanese officer who served in the Japanese military is not played by an actor but a local villager at Su'ao, Yilan.