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From the translator of the International Booker Prize-winning Taiwan Travelogue, Weeb is an unsettling, addictive novel about obsession, identity and the dangerous fictions we tell ourselves to belong.
'It's invigorating to read a debut this assured, this invested in the big questions - without forgetting the reader's delight... I loved it.' Kaveh Akbar
'Celebrates the way languages work, the way they project culture, identity, and our deepest desires. Weeb is terrific!' Gary Shteyngart
weeb (noun): slang for a non-Japanese person who is excessively devoted to Japanese culture, even to the point of wishing to adopt a Japanese identity
A recent graduate calling herself 'Rina' moves to Tokyo, ostensibly to launch her academic career, but in truth to pursue something far more private: her obsession with Kagami, the enigmatic hero of her favourite animé.
Fluent in Japanese, a meticulous student and alert to every nuance, Rina begins to construct a version of herself that might almost pass as Japanese. She curates her name, her past and her ambitions, drawing ever closer to the industry that surrounds her idol - and to the voice that brings him to life: the middle-aged actor Fujimoto Fumitaka.
As she burrows deeper into Tokyo's entertainment world, Rina becomes entangled with a cast of performers and outsiders - her Taiwanese idol-in-training neighbour, the eerily perfect child influencer she tutors, her favourite fan artist and an astute hairdresser - and her carefully assembled identity begins to fracture.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Lin King is a writer and translator based in Taipei and New York. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Boston Review and Joyland, among other publications, and has received the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Translations include The Boy from Clearwater by Yu Pei-Yun and Zhou Jian-Xin (Levine Querido) and Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-Zi (And Other Stories), which won the International Booker Prize 2026 and received the 2024 National Book Award in Translated Literature. Forthcoming translations include A Perfect Day to Put Your Head in the Oven by Lee Chia-Ying (Doubleday).
