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Daryl Qilin Yam, Lovelier, Lonelier, Epigram Books, 2021. 496 pgs.
In late March 1996, an intruder—tracked by millions around the globe—raced across the sky. This interloper, discovered by an amateur astronomer in Japan using a pair of large binoculars, was the Great Comet Hyakutake. With a blue, phosphorescent tail stretching some 3.4 to 3.8 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun, it skimmed past at a proximity of just 0.10 astronomical units (approximately 9 million miles), making it one of the most spectacular celestial events of the twentieth century.
In Daryl Qilin Yam’s novel, Lovelier, Lonelier, this stellar disruption coincides with the weekend gathering of four friends in Kyoto. Jing Aw is travelling with her friend Mateo Morales to re-enact the conceptual film RANDEN, which her mother once directed and performed in—fifteen seconds of harrowing screams unleashed at various sacred and secular sites across the city. Their host, Tori Yamamoto, introduces them to Isaac Neo, a runaway from Singapore.
In Part One, as the comet passes overhead, the boundaries between unconscious and conscious thought, imaginary and actual worlds, begin to dissolve, and strange phenomena ripple through the quartet. Isaac, for instance, finds his memories of a treasured 1982 family photograph—taken at the primate exhibit of Singapore Zoo, and remembered as the only time they ever went out as a happy family—spilling into his interactions with a macaque seated outside a phone booth. The macaque informs Isaac that it is not a figment of that memory, but a remnant from another dream he once had, heightening the liminality between waking and dreaming. Meanwhile, Tori quarrels with a giant fish (dressed in the uniform of a funicular operator), which tells her that it would be difficult to stop mid-journey and descend the mountain. The talking fish is a reimagining of the funeral flower arrangement created for her father—rumoured to have been shaped like “one giant, white tuna”. Yam’s flirtation with magical realism interlaces with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, wherein the signifiers and language embedded in each character’s world shape the unconscious so deeply that unformulated desires emerge through a complex interplay of metaphor, negation, and equivocation.
These uncanny events are not merely intrapersonal—perceptible only to the self—but also interpersonal, manifesting within shared social contexts. Tori hears the voice of her deceased father broadcast in a Kyoto marketplace, captivating onlookers as they struggle to comprehend the message. A nearby shopkeeper remarks that someone must have mistakenly played the wrong disaster preparedness recording. Meanwhile, Mateo and Jing encounter the ghostly embodiment of avant-garde artist Teiji Furuhashi, made corporeal through the pair’s associative memories and entangled histories: the artist’s multimedia installation at MoMA had brought Mateo and his partner together, and had also been included in a group exhibition that featured a talk by Jing’s mother.
It is not always clear why the characters’ internal states coalesce into certain entities but exclude others. When someone asks Jing why her mother—who had never wanted children and disappeared on the night Comet Hyakutake lit up the skies over Singapore—never returned, despite Jing herself claiming that “people can come back, after they’re gone,” she simply shakes her head. When Isaac peers through the window of an old apartment in search of the sister he had once abandoned, he sees only another version of himself—his own shadow. Certain things, once lost, may well be irrecoverable. The entities that are—and are not—reproduced in the novel serve to shape the characters’ inner conflicts into forms that expose, rather than compensate for, their personal losses. Yam thereby invites the reader to reflect—just as his characters do, with varying degrees of clarity—on which would be more difficult: “To be the thing that vanishes, without rhyme or reason, or the thing that is left behind, or … to be the thing that arrives unwelcome, to a world [one] would have to make [their] own.”
In Part Two, the narrative narrows to focus on two of the original four characters. Jing becomes a novelist, and Isaac, a celebrated television and stage actor in Singapore. In alternating chapters, Jing speaks through the lens of her science-fiction novel, The Horvallan, while Isaac’s narration unpacks the realities of his life and marriage.
Jing’s novel likewise adopts a dual structure, interlacing fragments of her affair with the exploits of an immortal alien—the Horvallan—across millennia. The tales of the alien’s adventures are, however, transfigurations: stories Jing—like a contemporary Scheherazade in a reimagining of One Thousand and One Nights—was told orally by her lover: “… from certain angles, you said our heroine looked rather more like me. … I was interested in our heroine, I wanted to know more about what she would learn about the Horvallan, whose likeness you’d hinted was just like yours.” As Jing becomes increasingly subsumed in her lover’s storytelling, the boundaries of self and identity blur, sundering space and time in the process: “… The sound of raindrops smattered all over the surfaces of your house. You said it would rain like this, would begin to storm like this, the moment the Horvallan and the spectre emerge from the forest. … You then pointed to me the windows that the Horvallan now proceeds to shut.”
The dynamics of the situation acquire a new level of complexity when Isaac assumes the point-of-view narration to reveal that the “script” he is reading in the real (albeit still fictional) world is, in fact, The Horvallan—material he had stolen from Jing’s notebooks, “her scattered jottings, a rough but thorough account of her affair.” This creates a connective structure—akin to a Möbius strip—whereby the inner narrative arcs of Jing and her lover, and the heroine and the Horvallan, invert to transform the outer frame of Isaac’s story. Isaac’s engagement with the Horvallan affair as a text—which also features Isaac himself—jolts him from a fugue state and forces him to confront the reality that his relationships are founded less on reciprocal desire than on asymmetrical attachments.
Metafictional recognitions within the story world also ripple outward into the extra-diegetic space, challenging the reader’s assumptions about the very notion of fidelity. Invoking Jorge Luis Borges’ concept of inversion (see Partial Magic in the Quixote, in Labyrinths, 1962), one might pose the following ontological conundrum: if a character in Jing’s/Yam’s novel can be a reader, then it is conceivable that you and I—as readers of The Horvallan/Lovelier, Lonelier—are ourselves fictitious. Yam’s novel operates as an epistemic catalyst, inviting readers to interrogate reality as something both perceived and constructed, where objectivity and subjectivity are interpreted in dialectical interplay. In this sense, it offers a Matrix-like red pill experience—not ideologically driven, but rather a literary gesture towards unmasking the illusion of knowability we project onto the world.
Yam’s characters also possess inner lives that are richly intertextual, embedded in cultural contexts shaped by both high art and popular media. Tori, for instance, appeals to tengu—mischievous beings from traditional Japanese folklore—as potential culprits behind the sudden appearances and disappearances of people and things. Sherry Wong—Isaac’s friend and television co-star—channels the negative assertion found in 10cc’s iconic song I’m Not in Love, cautioning Isaac not to mistake any of her actions for affirmations of affection. Jing implores her lover to “spirit [her] away” through his storytelling, a phrase that resonates with Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 film Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, in which Chihiro is spirited away to a realm of ancient spirits and spectral beings. Mateo, drawn to Joan Miró’s triptych The Hope of a Condemned Man, offers a quieter reflection—one that reverberates with the novel’s title and invites deeper contemplation.
Miró’s surrealist triptych of fierce lines and distorted forms—though lovely—shrouds loneliness and impermanence. The work serves as a commentary on the political prisoner Salvador Puig Antich, who was sentenced to death by garrote vil in 1974 under Francisco Franco’s brutal dictatorship. For Mateo, the blobs and striations evoke failed comets drifting through space, each one unravelling, head severing from tail: “promising young men spinning out of gravity’s grasp, destined in the end to be cast astray: lives made lovelier, by some silly notion of art, of beauty … only to be made undone, made lonelier … in their eventual confrontation with death.” However, Hermann Hesse’s 1972 volume of prose and poetry, Wandering, may also have shaped Mateo’s perception of the juxtaposition between “lovelier” and “lonelier”: “The world has become lovelier. I am alone, and I don’t suffer from my loneliness.” Hesse’s meditation on his own shift from public spectacle to private stillness aligns with Mateo’s quiet disappearance from the lives of his friends and partner. In a broader sense, then, Yam’s cultural dialogue with folktale, music, film, art, and literature forms a cohesive thread—one that gives texture and vibrancy to the characters’ interior lives and emotional landscapes.
Beyond its richly embedded intertextuality, Yam’s novel is also propelled by a strong narrative through-line that compels the reader forward, eager to discover the fates of the characters. The identity of Jing’s lover, for example, is deliberately withheld throughout Part Two—addressed only in the second person, as you, an entity both unknowable and hauntingly intimate. The name is disclosed only in Part Three, and not by Jing herself, but by someone outside the original group of friends. Why does Jing not name her lover—even at the novel’s close? Perhaps it is because she remains mired in idle nostalgia, still hoping to rediscover her vanished lover in a house “she hasn’t spied on for the past couple of months,” reflecting on “all of the possible ways she could split her family apart again.” To name the lover would be to impose finality—a corrective against her hope of recovering the past, of returning to the utopian terrain of her personal Shangri-La: the world of The Horvallan, where dreams bleed into waking.
The fictional disappearances of certain characters parallel the real-life vanishing acts of individuals in Japan—referred to as the Jōhatsu, or “the evaporated”—who, without warning, abandon their identities, occupations, families, and homes in order to begin anew. As with these real-world cases, the motivations behind the disappearances of Jing’s lover, as well as of Tori and Mateo, remain opaque. Isaac’s narrative also resists definitive closure—his heart pounds and his vision elongates as the shadow of a figure, swathed in light, emerges from a taxi to escort him into a new life. Such ambiguities are integral to Yam’s overarching themes: that people are inherently unknowable; that the interiority of another’s mind is ultimately inaccessible; and that it is possible for someone to “reappear in [another’s] life momentarily, even if just to make a mark, a small one.” As a character in The Horvallan proposes, fragmentary portrayals and indeterminate endings exemplify storytelling techniques that render time fluid and choice unfixed: “Your character must always wish there was something they could change, something they could do better, if they were granted the ability to turn back time.” This receptivity to liminal, recursive moments lies at the very heart of Lovelier, Lonelier—a novel that marks a seismic shift in the landscape of contemporary Singaporean literature.
How to cite: Low, Jason. “Daryl Qilin Yam’s Lovelier, Lonelier: A Red Pill of Metafiction” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 8 Aug. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/08/08/lovelier.
Jason Low is a writer. He is a queer Hakka-Peranakan Chinese, born in Brunei and raised in Singapore. He now resides in Wellington, New Zealand. After earning a PhD in Psychology and working as an academic scientist for over two decades, he redirected his focus to creative writing. His short fiction has appeared in Penstricken, Variety Pack Literary Magazine, and SUSPECT—Singapore Unbound’s Journal of Asian Writing and Art. He can be contacted via Instagram: @jasoncatsplantsbooks.
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