On a cold, gloomy night, twenty-three-year-old Kyoko stands in the rain with a knife in her hoodie's pocket. Her target is Daniel, who seduced Kyoko's mother then callously dropped her, leading to her death. But tonight, there will be repercussions. Following the unsuspecting Daniel home, Kyoko manages to get a rash kidnapping plot off the ground ... and then nothing goes as planned. The Fetishist is the story of three people—Kyoko, a Japanese American punk-rock singer full of rage and grief; Daniel, a philandering violinist forced to confront the wreckage of his past; and Alma, the love of Daniel's life, a Korean American cello prodigy long adored for her beauty, passion, and talent, but who spends her final days examining if she was ever, truly, loved.
The delightful, fantastic, fabulous and unfortunately posthumous second novel by Katherine Min ... There's hardly a sentence in this book — feverish and funny and razor-sharp — that does not merit quoting ... Wonderful.
Inspired by Lolita, but with an Asian fetishist in the role of Humbert Humbert and the objects of his objectification given voice, The Fetishist presents a tightly crafted examination of racial and sexual politics that is at once nuanced and no-holds-barred ... Min unspools the tale in short chapters, alternating her third-person omniscient narration primarily among Alma, Daniel, and Kyoko, whose perspectives we dip into and out of in moments of free indirect discourse befitting a Victorian novel. Long, winding sentences filled with wordplay unfold virtuosically ... It is Kyoko's white-hot rage that forces this confrontation, but her chapters are the weakest in the novel. Kyoko's perspective is blinkered and juvenile, her grief largely unexamined because it has 'twisted to hate, hate hammered to anger, until the anger, the hate, and the grief had become grotesquely fused.' While Min does give Kyoko a brief moment of revelation toward the novel's end, it feels unconvincingly pat ... There is something ironic about a dead woman feeling like the missing center in a posthumously published novel.
Min’s characters are flawed and lovable—even the villains. Ultimately, the story rages against and holds space for the infuriating experience of loving a villain. A farce that deftly tackles shame, grief, parents, chronic illness, colonialism, and the hollowness of enmity in a systemically unjust world? Magic. Min’s wit and wisdom live on.
