Y/N by Esther Yi – Aspects of Love
Y/N is a novel by Esther Yi, published in 2023, appearing in a number of best of year lists – Time Magazine, The New Yorker, Cosmopolitan.
The narrator of the story is an unnamed young woman living in Berlin. She hangs out with a cool student crowd, but her job is writing advertising copy for a brand of canned artichoke hearts. One night the narrator’s flatmate takes her to see a Korean boy band. The members are all named after heavenly bodies. They come over as an odd amalgam of children’s entertainers and earnest, bardic philosophers. While the narrator is determined to be snooty and disdainful, the performance leads to obsession with one of the singing and dancing boys – known as Moon.
You might say that the band is its own brand of canned heart, manufacturing love for its fans. The narrator turns her copywriting talents towards writing fan fiction involving the band. The central character in her stories is called Y/N, denoting an empty space where the reader can place themselves. Y/N stands for ‘your name’. As her obsession cranks up, the narrator abandons her job and travels to Korea in a desperate, ambivalent search for Moon.
You could say that the book spins itself around the contradictions inherent in the idea of love. Sometimes Y/N presents love as a spiritual concept, the sort of thing associated with religions, where a god loves everyone. The feeling here is of something universal, transcending boundaries. There is much of this in Y/N as the narrator attempts to go beyond the limits of her mundane life through her love of Moon. By contrast there is the practical sense of love as it works between actual people. Now we find that love is something very specific, focusing on a person who will be there for you, rather than gadding about with all the others. Veering towards the universal in a practical context might cause a lot of upset. This conception of love can be characterised not by big, sweeping generalities, but by things at the small end of the emotional scale – familiarity, routine, domesticity, making a home that serves as protection from a big, lonely world.
How the same word can be used to describe such opposing states is quite something. Around this conundrum Y/N centres itself, deriving much humour and interest from the collision of incompatibilities, all struggling to be part of the same thing.
Y/N is funny, bizarre, and beautifully written in a surprising, off-kilter style. It’s emotional and thoughtful, detached and involving, funny, tragic, grand, puncturing of pomposities. I loved it – and I use that phrase advisedly.
