Being a fan of something is one of life’s pleasures in the twenty-first century. But in an age of digital connection and social disconnectivity, how does someone intently bored with life demonstrate their fanaticism? Esther Yi’s debut novel, Y/N, grapples with this through a weirdly esoteric tale of an unnamed narrator who falls desperately for a K-pop star and goes on a journey to integrate him further into her life.

While it might be easy to take Y/N as a parable for zealous fans of all sorts everywhere, K-pop or otherwise, the universality of the story is not in the experience of being a K-pop fan; it’s in the desire to see one’s self reflected in the world around you. Our Korean American narrator’s story begins after she goes with her roommate to a K-pop concert and immediately falls for the boy band’s youngest member, Moon, with whom she shares both cultural and physical similarities; at one point she is even made to be a Moon stand-in at a local fan event. Her life changes the moment she sees Moon on stage, and she spends the rest of the book following and finding him. This is both literal and literary; even as she uproots her life to travel to South Korea, she writes fanfiction where she imagines being in a relationship with him.

• Tags: Esther Yi, Issue 31, K-Pop, South Korea, Tamar Herman