Y/N

by Esther Yi

In Esther Yi’s Y/N, a woman becomes obsessed with a K-Pop star and follows her obsession to its logical conclusion. She blows up her relationship with her boyfriend and books a one-way ticket to Seoul, leaving behind her job and the visa appointment that will allow her to continue living as an American expat in Berlin. The object of her obsession, whose name is Moon, has suddenly quit the boy band that made him famous, and she will go looking for him in the places where he used to be, waiting to be reunited with the person she wishes she had known for hundreds of years.

In interviews online, Yi has said that the book isn’t about K-Pop at all. It’s not meant as an exaggeration or a satire. It’s earnestly a book about love and meaning. This is how the narrator describes the boy band before she herself succumbs:

“I was familiar with the staggering dimensions of their popularity, how the premiere of their latest music video had triggered a power outage across an entire Pacific island. I knew the boys were performers of supernatural charisma whose concerts could leave a fan permanently destabilized, unable to return to the spiritual attenuation of her daily life. I also knew about the boys’ exceptional profundity in matters of the heart, how they offered that same fan her only chance of survival in a world they’d exposed for the risible fraud that it was.”

And these are the terms of the narrator’s search. Fandom gives her a framework for a worldview she basically already had. And the book treats the search for love and meaning as high-stakes, allowing the narrator to describe it for us in the first person, using sometimes turgid language, through a series of settings and scenarios that are frequently surreal. The book can be tiresome, because the narrator is tiresome, as are many of the characters she meets. But the book is fully committed to its premise in a way that is not zany but insane. So few books are insane, or are capable of hooking you into their insanity and making you share it. That may not sound like a recommendation, but I think it’s high praise.