A recent college grad goes to Japan in pursuit of her all-consuming anime obsession, in a darkly humorous debut for fans of Colored Television, Y/N, and Big Swiss.

Having recently graduated from a prestigious university in the United States, a young woman who goes by Rina moves to Tokyo to complete academic research and tutor English on the side. But this is mostly a front for her true passion: Kagami, the cerebral master alchemist from her favorite anime.

At first glance, she seems like a textbook weeb—the slightly derogatory term for non-Japanese people fixated on Japanese culture. But Rina believes she is more than that. With fluent language skills, a racially ambiguous face, and an invented name, she can almost pass as part Japanese. She is ambitious, calculating, and clever, and she has meticulously studied Japan’s colonial history, the particularities of its customs and linguistics. Rina's actual identity doesn't matter, as the only thing about herself that feels real is her devotion to Kagami. She will do whatever she can to have what she craves: the purest possible experience of him—specifically, of his voice, which belongs to a middle-aged voice actor named Fujimoto Fumitaka. With help from her secretly Taiwanese idol-in-training neighbor, the eerily perfect child influencer she tutors, her favorite fan art creator, and an astute hairdresser, Rina infiltrates the Japanese entertainment industry, though the results are not what she expects.

Whip-smart, irreverent, and audaciously satirical, Weeb captures the glittering magical energy of a cult anime while delivering a piercing commentary on race, appropriation, and belonging. As proficient in online fandom as it is in cultural theory, this is the tantalizing, provocative debut of an acclaimed writer that unravels how our desires define and derange us.