No products in the cart.
Y/N By Esther Yi Is The New K-Pop Obsession
“He is pure future. It’s not him that I love. I love the story of him.”
The world of fandom is one ripe for literary exploration. Esther Yi’s Y/N, the story of one woman’s destabilizing love for a K-Pop star, does so both thought-provokingly and entertainingly. Our narrator works as a copywriter for a canned artichoke business and is in an unsatisfactory relationship. They are sceptical when first attending a K-Pop show with a friend. However, this scepticism moves alarmingly quickly into fanaticism when she first lays eyes on Moon, the youngest member of the band. This fanaticism turned obsession then begins tearing our narrator’s life (and the novel’s world) apart at the seams.
The Narrator of Y/N
We know very little about the unnamed narrator, except, of course, that she loves Moon. Perhaps her infatuation with Moon begins simply as an excuse to escape from her life – and boy, does it work. In Y/N, fandom is in itself portrayed as a loss of touch with reality. “They confused their navigation through the stunning variety of meaningless choices as an expression of their individuality,” Yi asks, is the necessity of fandom a symptom of the unbearable tedium and dissatisfaction of modern society? “We no longer go to church once a week; we attend a stadium concert once a year,”
Meeting fellow fans, our narrator becomes aware of a particular subsect of fanfiction, the self-insert, or: “a type of fanfiction where the protagonist was called Y/N, or ‘your name.’ Whenever Y/N appeared in the text, the reader could plug in their own name, thereby sharing events with the celebrity they had no chance of meeting in real life.” She begins creating these stories in earnest, but soon, the lines blur between our narrator and Y/N herself, making their two stories even more difficult to distinguish between.
The book delivers a subtle roast of fanfic: “There is never a story when it comes to Y/N. Only absurd and arbitrary leaps of plots.” But this barbed comment also critiques the novel, whose plot quickly begins to fall apart as Y/N takes over. “I preferred these stories to most contemporary novels, which mirrored the pieties of the day with absurd ardour.”
The Plot Escalates
After Moon announces his shock retirement, our narrator (and Y/N) travels to Seoul to try to track him down. But once there, an escalating series of mixups leads to pure chaos. “Only after we hung up did it dawn on me that I’d been asking my yes/no questions in an intonation signalling declarative statements. Everything I wasn’t sure about – he’d thought I was expressing with absolute certainty.” The loss of meaning is both literal, in terms of poor translation, and more existential, as a dreamlike weirdness descends on the novel. We begin floating in and out of surrealism, while the story seems almost mythological or like a fairy tale or ancient quest.
From here, the book becomes comfortingly impossible to follow. In order to take it all in, one must surrender to the story and enjoy it without worrying too much about what’s actually going on. This reading experience, though sometimes frustrating, is also conversely quite relaxing. It works as a remark on the futility of trying to grasp onto or understand anything. Yi uses the surrealism of the novel to point out the impossibility of certainty more broadly. “I was a person. I knew this nothing else, that I was a person, however hapless, however void.”
“The point is that I’m no longer me. I’m Y/N. I’ve taken my destiny into my own hands, and I’ve decided that I am now a person who knows Moon.”
Grab your copy of Y/N at Waterstone’s here.
