Review: Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami

The bestselling Japanese novelist’s latest work – her first serious plunge into noir – is unsettling from beginning to end

If there’s one thing Mieko Kawakami, author of Breasts and Eggs and All the Lovers in the Night, among others, is good at conjuring, it is a particular kind of unease. Not the obviously dramatic, door-slamming kind, but the quieter sort that settles into a room and simply refuses to leave. Sisters in Yellow, her first full plunge into noir, carries that unease from its opening page to its last, even when very little appears to be happening on the surface.

In a flat in Tokyo (Shutterstock)

448pp, ₹799; Pan Macmillan India

The novel opens with Hana, now in her forties, stumbling upon a news report about a woman she once lived with, who has been arrested for assault, intimidation, and illegal confinement. From there, the book folds back into the 1990s, into a teenage Hana scraping by in a cramped Tokyo apartment with a mother who works nights at a hostess bar and offers little in the way of protection. When an older woman named Kimiko enters her life, warm and magnetic in the way certain adults can be to lonely teenagers, Hana finally seems to find something like a family. Together, they open Lemon, a scrappy little bar that becomes, for a while, the safest place Hana has ever known.

Eventually, though, things take a criminal turn and as money runs out and desperation sets in, Hana and her makeshift family drift into fraud. First reluctantly, then with the numbing rhythm of routine. Kawakami doesn’t dramatize the crime; she almost bores you with it, page after page of ATM withdrawals and card-scam mechanics rendered in flat, procedural prose. It’s a deliberate choice, and a risky one. What holds the novel together isn’t plot momentum, but the slow, devastating accumulation of small betrayals.

Author Mieko Kawakami (Courtesy PanMacmillan)

There’s also something quietly political simmering under the domestic surface of this novel, though Kawakami never announces it as such. Hana’s story, at its core, is an indictment of every safety net that failed to protect her. A mother too consumed by her own survival to notice her daughter’s, a state that offers no real cushion for teenage girls without money or family, and a society quick to criminalize the very women it first abandoned.

Kimiko’s character sketch too is a significant one. She is neither predator nor saint, and the novel is far more interesting for refusing to flatten her into either. There are stretches where her care for Hana feels entirely genuine, at times even unconditional, a warmth Hana has never received from her own mother. Other times, it seems something more self-serving is at play. Kawakami lets both readings sit side by side without resolving the tension, which mirrors exactly how Hana herself seems to experience the relationship: gratefully, uncritically, and much too late, with growing dread.

With Sisters in Yellow, Kawakami remains unmatched at writing women who are neither victims nor villains but something far more uncomfortable. They’re ordinary people making the only choices available to them. For readers willing to sit with that discomfort, this is a story that lingers long after the final page.

Arunima Mazumdar is an independent writer. She is @sermoninstone on Twitter and @sermonsinstone on Instagram.