Several years after her 2006 debut, Secondhand World, earned Katherine Min praise and applause, she shared snippets from her next book with her daughter, Kayla Min Andrews: "Lots of shit is going to happen--suicide, kidnapping, attempted murder. It'll be arch and clever but also heartfelt." Min finished a draft of The Fetishist in 2013 but deemed it "abandoned" when she was diagnosed with cancer in 2014; she died in 2019. Andrews rescued--and edited--the novel and sought publishing assistance from Pulitzer Prize finalist Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings), who provides the incisive introduction. Indeed, it took a village to create this literary marvel exactly as Min described.
"This is a story, a fairy tale of sorts," Min mischievously promises in her author's note. "And because it is a fairy tale, it has a happy ending... depending on where you put THE END." Min opens with Japanese American punk musician Kyoko, who's planning to avenge her mother Emi's suicide by punishing the fickle (white) Lothario who discarded her. She's "more Hello Kitty than killer," but murdering Daniel is the only way to alleviate the anger, hate, and grief that's "deformed" her young life.
Since that brief affair with Emi, Daniel's devolved from a violinist of some renown to performing private concerts for the "dying and newly dead"; in middle age, though, he's still seducing young (Asian) women. On the other side of the country, Korean American cellist Alma, Daniel's vibrant, singular soulmate who he irrevocably lost 20 years ago because of his careless liaison with Emi, is painfully succumbing to the MS that's already robbed her of her precious music.
Wending back and forth over decades, Min reveals these intertwined lives: desperate Emi killed by love, frenzied Kyoko trapped in the past, fading Alma isolated by regret and illness. What binds them together is Daniel, who is, of course, the titular fetishist. "Once Asian, never again Caucasian," Alma quipped after their first night spent together. "She had meant it as a joke, but... it had turned out to be true." Min's focus is magnificently aimed at dissecting, confronting, and exposing the fetishization of Asian women, but she never loses sight of engaging, inventive, playful storytelling, as she transforms Florence's Ponte Vecchio (where lovers fasten locks in a sign of commitment) into a site of betrayal, Yukio Mishima's fatal self-mutilation into a viral rock performance, and stolen fugu into a murder weapon. Balancing biting humor, wrenching despair, and unexpected redemption, Min radiantly succeeds in delivering that promised (mostly, cautiously) happy ending. --Terry Hong, BookDragon
Shelf Talker: Katherine Min's posthumous The Fetishist is an impeccable, surprisingly humorous, utterly poignant novel about an Asiaphilic Lothario and the women who love (and hate) him.