Esther Yi Y/N《Y/N》

《Y/N》是埃丝特·易的一部奇怪、有趣、有时又很华丽的新小说，探讨了将你的整个生活纳入对可能存在或可能不存在的事物的渴望中的后果。一位住在柏林的美国人遇到了穆恩，一个拥有全球粉丝的韩国流行乐队中最年轻的成员。当她的室友拉着她去参加一场乐队的音乐会时，穆恩“流畅、悲惨、古老”的舞蹈改变了一切。音乐会上，她发现了新的职业：撰写以穆恩为主题的同人小说。

“Y/N”同人小说的魅力在于你的故事是专门为你而写的错觉。问题在于“你”必须保持未定义状态，以便任何人都可以栖居在其中。通过将其作为小说的主题，埃丝特·易将令人尴尬的噱头变成一种哲学主张，讲述人们如何独自度过一生，每个人都经历着严格发生在他们身上的现实。


书名：Y/N《Y/N》

作者：Esther Yi

简介：Y/Na novel about a Korean American woman living in Berlin whose obsession with a K-pop idol sends her to Seoul on a journey of literary self-destruction.

It’s as if her life only began once Moon appeared in it. The desultory copywriting work, the boyfriend, and the want of anything not-Moon quickly fall away when she beholds the idol in concert, where Moon dances as if his movements are creating their own gravitational field; on live streams, as fans from around the world comment in dozens of languages; even on skincare products endorsed by the wildly popular Korean boyband, of which Moon is the youngest, most luminous member. Seized by ineffable desire, our unnamed narrator begins writing Y/N fanfic—in which you, the reader, insert [Your/Name] and play out an intimate relationship with the unattainable star.

Then Moon suddenly retires, vanishing from the public eye. As Y/N flies from Berlin to Seoul to be with Moon, our narrator, too, journeys to Korea in search of the object of her love. An escalating series of mistranslations and misidentifications lands her at the headquarters of the Kafkaesque entertainment company that manages the boyband until, at a secret location, together with Moon at last, art and real life approach their final convergence.

Surreal, hilarious, and shrewdly poignant, Y/N is a provocative literary debut about the universal longing for transcendence and the tragic struggle to assert one’s singular story amidst the amnesiac effects of globalization. Esther Yi’s prose unsettles the boundary between high and mass art, exploding our expectations of a novel about “identity” and offering in its place a sui generis picture of the loneliness that afflicts modern life.