Y/N

K-pop and metafiction collide in this debut novel.

Yi’s first novel follows an unnamed narrator, a Korean American woman living in Berlin, who spends her days working as a copywriter and develops an obsession with a K-pop group. From its earliest pages, the novel employs pop music as a way to wrangle with art and literature on a grand scale. For instance, the narrator documents the band's metatextual obsessions: “Like a civilization, the boys entered new eras, one for each album. In preparation for their current era, they’d pored over a Korean translation of Sophocles, troubled by Oedipus’s decision to blind himself.” And Yi also incorporates the different ways that fandom resonates throughout popular culture. The book’s title is a reference to a type of fan fiction where the reader is asked to substitute their own name—“Y/N” stands for “your name”—throughout the story. At one point, the narrator describes fandom as a way of measuring chronology: “Fans remembered details from their lives in arbitrary connection with the pack of boys. It was how we kept track of time.” When Moon, the narrator’s favorite member of the group and the figure at the root of her fan fiction, abruptly retires, it prompts her to travel to Seoul, where she revisits the area where her father grew up. Her experiences also prompt her to think about her relationship to the Korean language: “I had no Korean handwriting of my own, having grown up speaking the language but almost never writing in it.” Yi includes some of the narrator’s fan fiction alongside her journey, which takes on an increasingly archetypal quality as it reaches its conclusion and she encounters characters known as the Caregiver and the Music Professor. It’s a surreal quest that seems tailor-made for the present moment.

A heady, immersive journey into musical fandom and cultural dislocation.