Written before her death in 2019, and published with the help of her daughter, Katherine Min’s The Fetishist allows Min to pour out something of herself that we might otherwise have sadly missed. Darkly funny, strangely poignant and sometimes startlingly vicious, The Fetishist is a wonderful novel from an author we lost too soon, and a sweeping yet intimate statement on the impacts of racism and sexism on Asian American women.
Kyoko is a Japanese American rock musician, while Alma is a Korean American cellist whose career was sidelined by illness. Both are tied irrevocably to Daniel, a white man and fellow musician whose pursuit of Asian women seems to have ruined both Alma’s life and the life of Kyoko’s late mother. Shifting between these three characters’ perspectives, Min tells us the captivating, hilariously twisted story of their intertwined lives, from a potential hit song and an infamous affair, to a kidnapping gone wrong.
Min’s prose is simultaneously playful and powerful. She crafts sentences that are somehow able to contain both breathless puns and elegant intonations on the meaning of life. The Fetishist flies on the strength of her words, and that strength transfers into her characters. There’s not a simple narrative here, no firm sense of right and wrong that we can apply to every page. Instead, these complicated, messy characters are lent warmth and gravity in each word, each moment. Kyoko, Alma and Daniel are all searching for meaning, all trying to sort through the regrets they carry and the sins they bear. They feel whole, feel human, and therefore are free to surprise us.
While The Fetishist is many things, surprising is probably the most apt word to describe Min’s posthumous work. This remarkably clever, wickedly incisive little book will keep you hanging on every word and leave you with questions you’ll ponder for days.
