His name is Moon. He is the youngest member of a K-pop band with a global following. Before the narrator, an American living in Berlin, sees him perform, her idea of transcendence is purely theoretical, as if the word were a sheet of music that no one could play. When her flatmate drags her to one of Moon’s concerts, his dancing—“fluid, tragic, ancient”—changes everything. “He seemed to control even the speed at which he fell from the air,” she marvels, “his feet landing with aching tenderness, as if he didn’t want to wake up the stage.”
The narrator doesn’t have a name, or much of a life. She produces copy for a company that sells canned artichoke hearts, a job that demands she “credibly infuse the vegetable with the ability to feel romantic love for its consumer.” After the concert, she discovers a new vocation: writing Moon-themed fan fiction. Following the online convention that allows readers to insert themselves into the story, she calls her protagonist Y/N: “Your Name.” But it’s the narrator who enters her own plot, merging, through magic or perhaps devotion, with her fictional avatar. These three women—the narrator, Y/N, and N, a hybrid of the previous two—guide us through “Y/N,” a strange, funny, and at times gorgeous new novel by Esther Yi. (N observes that her letter forms one shaky half of “M,” for Moon.) Full of characters that squirm and run together, as if the reader were trying to decipher an out-of-focus eye chart, the book evokes how precarious identity itself can be. It also explores the consequences of subsuming your entire life in a desire for what may or may not exist.
In her poem “Transcendental Etude,” from 1977, Adrienne Rich asks how human beings might come to experience the sublime. If transcendence were like learning to play an instrument, she writes, we might begin “with the simple exercises first / and slowly go on trying / the hard ones.” But instead we are thrown into the world, and “we take on / everything at once before we’ve even begun / to read or mark time.” The search for fulfillment in our lives, Rich suggests, isn’t a graceful performance but a reckless, half-blind lurch into the unknown.
Like Rich’s poem, “Y/N” is about the messiness of attempting transcendence. Eschewing “simple exercises,” whatever those might be, Yi’s narrator flings herself headlong into her fascination with Moon. She ghosts her copywriting gig; pores over his live streams; attends fan conventions, where she spars with rivals who don’t understand Moon like she does; and finally buys a one-way ticket to Seoul. But—familiar story—the more she chases Moon, the more he eludes her. Each new purchase with his face on it or visit to his favorite noodle shop only underscores his absence.
“Y/N” unfolds as a series of digressions, false starts, and near-misses, with the book’s structure mirroring the thwarting and misdirection of the narrator’s desire. Once she arrives in Seoul, she falls into a romance with a painter named O. She does eventually infiltrate Polygon Plaza, the Escher-like headquarters of the band’s entertainment company, but Moon has already left. Throughout, Yi displays a keen sense of irony; her oneiric, ceremonious writing has the consistency of a poem put in a blender with an academic paper. (“True, thousands of kilometers may have been closed between you and him, but keep thinking with a measuring stick and you’ll reduce yourself to an asymptote.”) Gradually, it becomes clear that Moon, like the character Y/N, is a placeholder. He can’t make the narrator whole—once she has him, she’ll be consumed by longing for longing itself.
We know to expect this outcome in part because the narrator predicts it in one of her stories. Her fanfic starts as a letter to a former lover; in the next installment, Y/N begins a relationship with Moon, a beguiling stranger she meets on the street. She’s smitten at first, and reading his words fills her “with a violent light.” But, months into their cohabitation, the spark fades: her beloved has become domesticated—he has become “yet another person standing between me and Moon.” Y/N decides that her boyfriend must leave to become a pop star. Only when he is famous, and she remains “unknown and unremarkable,” will her passion for him be the correct size.
If this doesn’t sound like typical fan fiction, that’s because the narrator doesn’t see herself as a typical fan. (She’d probably identify as a hater.) Bubbly enthusiasm is not in her nature. “My spiritual sphincter stayed clenched to keep out the cheap and stupid,” she declares. And solidarity offends her; she loves only “that which made me secretive, combative, severe.” What seduces her is not Moon, exactly, but the prospect of using him to transcend everyone else, excising “them from my perception of space.” At Moon’s concert, she imagines vaulting onstage to intercept her prize, floating above the crowd, her own outlines brightening. “For a single moment in time,” she thinks, “I would be all that he saw.”
For Yi, the goal of scaling one’s appetites is quixotic: the defining trait of a fan is that she lacks a sense of proportion. The narrator cannot seem to decide how big she should be. She longs to seize the spotlight, to swell to an unimaginable size in the eyes of the world. Elsewhere, though, she wants to shed the self entirely, framing her body as a bottleneck through which only a limited number of the universe’s dazzling sensations and perceptions might pass. (“I’m tired of experiencing reality as that which happens strictly to me,” she complains.) Ask her therapist, a man whose “purplish lips” look “impractically ornate, like they were expressly designed to mangle sound,” and you’ll hear that her problem is a deficit, not a surplus, of ego. He tells her that, in abandoning herself to her obsession, she is being silly, irrational; indeed, she is regressing.
Herr Doktor, whose craggy features and patronizing air summon Dr. Freud, has a point. The narrator’s desire to fuse with the universe is childlike. In pursuing Moon, she seeks to recapture what Freud called the “oceanic feeling,” an infantile state of union with all things. Her yearning to behold eternity—to return to a time “when I was still steeling myself for the limitations of the body to come”—is shared by almost every character in the novel. Moon himself reveals that his most vital choreographic gesture came to him underwater, while swimming, and that, try as he might, he “could never recreate this movement on land, in the midst of life.”
As Internet fandom has moved closer to the center of culture, there’s been a corresponding attempt to reclaim the figure of the fan. No longer a breathless follower, she is cast as creative, a critical thinker, someone who makes her idol raw material for her own self-fashioning. Yi gleefully shreds this portrait. Her narrator’s fixation isn’t productive or pro-social, and it’s certainly not an effective path to intimacy with Moon. When N finally tracks her idol down, forcing him to read her fan fiction, he groans. “Don’t think I haven’t heard all this before,” he says. Rather than a muse, the singer is a black hole, sucking up the narrator’s metaphysical yearnings and giving them what seems to her a trite shape. When she discovers that he’s the most written-about celebrity on her fanfic site (a thinly veiled Archive of Our Own), she panics: “His first-place ranking made the disturbing suggestion that my imagination, one of the few remaining places where I felt truly free, was actually the site of my dreariest conformity. . . . For the first time, I doubted the singularity of my love and thereby its truth.”
Who doesn’t fantasize, on some level, that her most transporting experiences, which are often achingly personal and private, are unique to her? O, N’s love interest, echoes her sentiment, saying, “I wanted a passion so totally mine that no one else could possibly have it. So totally mine that if I didn’t exist, then the passion itself couldn’t exist.” The problem, for Yi, is that writing about your love—committing it to paper, where it becomes something that other people see, as opposed to something that you feel—makes it generic, interchangeable. No matter how grotesque the narrator’s images or how startling her plotlines, they can’t disguise the raw human need behind them. Creating fanfic allows the narrator to express a thirst for sublimity, but it also forces her to confront the humdrum nature of that thirst.
In an interview, Yi spoke of fan fiction as a distillation of the impulse behind all art, “this desire to put yourself in the same space as the transcendental.” For her, fanfic strips away “pretensions of polish, of quality, of sophistication,” revealing the abasement of the original urge. In this way, the novel, dressing a timeless story about the difficulty of satisfying desire in 2023 clothes, joins a long line of grail quests: Petrarch seeking Laura, Ahab chasing Moby Dick, Gatsby pining for Daisy. Moon’s character isn’t really used to tease out the personhood of pop stars. Instead, he functions as an orb of reflected light, the surface upon which people project their bottomless hungers.
Where Yi’s book feels new is in its acute awareness of how globalization amplifies this sense of incompletion. Not only are characters stuck wanting things they can’t have or don’t want once they have them but they are also incessantly reminded of all the people they will never matter to and all the things they will never acquire. Yi salts her novel with products that promise satisfaction and technologies that hustle connection and professional services that will take your money to teach you empathy. For N—born in the United States, employed by an Australian expat in Berlin, wandering around Seoul, enthralled with a global sensation—the transnational architecture propping up Moon’s celebrity may be the closest she can get to the sublime. It’s the kind of approximation that makes the real thing seem only farther away.
Yi’s characters hope that, by losing themselves in another, they can find rebirth. But there’s no shared dawn in the novel, only an isolating late-capitalist twilight. Orphans proliferate: N meets a teen who cycles endlessly through juvenile-detention centers; she tours a shelter for missing children and decides that the whole world consists of lost kids who don’t know that they’re lost. The book features a chilly Music Professor, a jilted Caregiver, and a demented teacher, but—aside from N’s mother, who is tantalizingly alluded to as a character left out of someone else’s book—only one mom. She belongs to O, who lives with her parent in a high-rise surrounded by cicadas. The older woman can no longer hear the insects. O and the narrator, meanwhile, find their song deafening—“a foot stomping on the side of a cardboard box,” the narrator complains, “too much of the wrong noise.”
The collective drone signals engulfment, the dispersal of the self into something larger. But this subsumption doesn’t resemble a blissful regression to a primordial state of unity. The cicada swarm, which divides the daughter who hears it from the mother who cannot, is a horror-movie image of suffocating anomie. Here is a vision of fandom that recalls the familiar dystopia of mid-twentieth-century suburbia, with its lonely conformists trapped in identical split-levels, aggregated but disjoined.
In one of the narrator’s stories, Y/N develops the hobby of dismantling clocks. She can’t take them apart fast enough. She’s in a room filled with “torrential” ticking: “so multiple, so motley—dozens of cuckoo clocks among them—that it creates a single wash of noise.” The allure of reading “Your Name” fanfic is the illusion that you are not one of eight billion timepieces, that your love story could only have been written for you. And the catch of reading this kind of fanfic is that the “you” must remain undefined so that anyone can inhabit it. Yi transforms an embarrassing gimmick into a philosophical claim, about the way people go through life alone together, each experiencing reality as that which happens strictly to them. In “Transcendental Etude,” Rich calls the emotion that arises from this disconnection “homesickness.” We are “homesick” for an undivided self, she writes, and the goal of all our striving is simply to return to a place that our time away has lent a lunar strangeness. It’s startling—the reframing of transcendence as something so modest. Yi understands the simplicity of that longing, its primal nature, as well as its impossibility. “I awoke,” the narrator says, “faced with the formidable task of finding Moon somewhere in the world.” ♦
