Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-Zi is one of the most, if not the most, meta novels I've read. Yang presents the novel, a complete work of fiction published in 2020, as a second(!) Mandarin translation of a Japanese novel that was the in-universe Japanese author's novelization of her time in Japan-occupied Taiwan in 1938. The version I read was Lin King's English translation of this novel, which added a whole additional layer of meta (and distance, as how to romanize the same characters used in Japanese and Mandarin but in what would have been different spoken linguistic context gets conveyed to English readers).
The audacity of this conceit is hard to convey. All of the forewords and afterwords that talk about the "history of the author (fictional Aoyama Chizuko)" and whether (fictional) Taiwanese O Chizuru/Wang Tshian-hoh was a real figure and the multiple (fictional) translators talking about the considerations they had while translating and their relations to the subjects of the (fictional) "original" Japanese manuscript--all of it is part of the conceit!
Everything but the English edition afterword is part of the fiction:
This is the only nonfiction but see how even with the English version the team considered continuing to play into the fiction that an original Japanese manuscript exists:
These are some of the wildest footnotes you'll see:
Yang, the real-life author of all of it, writing the novel in such a way as to have to provide "corrections" and "translation" and "context" clarifications for the "modern" audience of 2020. (No Japanese manuscript exists so Yang had to plant this false layer and further disguised it as a second attempt at a Mandarin translation.)
Aoyama, in-universe fictional author, "providing" footnotes that need to have a 1938 context.
King, doing the English translation, having to consider anything a non-Taiwanese audience would need clarified and talk about the "layers" of translation happening.
By the end of the novel, the layers of translation and the conceit (and these aspects' commentary on colonization) were all I could think about--which is impressive considering that the chronicling of food feels like 90% of the novel. So much food. Much of the cuisine might not exist today so it was a labor of Yang's niche interests fed to us through the pill of meta madness.
Is the novel gay? If the flavor of gay you prefer is the type that lives in the subtext, then, yes, this novel will scratch that itch. If you want your gay to be gay smooches, then no.
Really, though, the narrative frame is the star of the achievement.
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