SISTERS IN YELLOW, by Mieko Kawakami; translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio
There’s a scene in Mieko Kawakami’s gritty, noirish, almost Richard Price-like new novel, “Sisters in Yellow,” in which Japanese society convulses after the sudden death of Hideto Matsumoto, the rebellious lead guitarist of the country’s most successful rock band, X Japan. This really happened, in 1998, and X Japan still exists, though it hasn’t released new music or toured for nearly a decade.
We witness the emotional ferment — as all-encompassing an event in Japan as the mourning of Princess Diana in Britain a year earlier — from the point of view of a young woman in Tokyo who didn’t care about the band. She’s held rapt by the vigils, though, and by the televised funeral service, the flurry of concert and video clips:
In silence we watched the images repeat on the talk shows. Thousands of people shaking and crying, falling in the streets, crawling, wailing his name, hunched over, wringing their lungs for every last bit of volume. Every one of them was suffering, so devastated they could barely stand it, and when I saw how real their sorrow was, I started crying, too.
The scenes consume her. Listening to brokenhearted young people being interviewed on television, she says: “I realized that their thoughts and feelings were revolving around, had revolved around, one person, and I knew I was witnessing something that was both amazing and terrifying.”
The speaker is Hana, a teenager of slender means. X Japan is not her thing, but manga is. The comics define her standards of heroism and beauty. When someone gives her a wink, she’s floored: She’s never seen one outside of manga. She belongs to a generation that finds more community and connection in pop culture than they can anywhere else.
“Sisters in Yellow,” translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio, is about Hana, mostly, but it’s also about several other young women like her. They grew up poor; they have few friends and only distant family; they work in bars or as the “compensated daters” of much older men. They’re floaters, tough-stemmed flowers, often without official papers. They exist along society’s margins.
Kawakami defines them in part by the convenience-store food they eat. There are more scenes in McDonald’s in this book, I think, than in any other novel I’ve read. Chicken McNuggets have rarely sounded more appetizing, more familiar and reassuring. Hana and some friends turn to crime (credit card scams) and the pressure on them keeps mounting. What society won’t give them they are going to take, if only in small bites.
This milieu, especially the bar settings, in which women are paid to keep men company and sing karaoke with them, is familiar territory for Kawakami. “I’m a graduate of hostess university,” she said in a 2023 interview. These bars were the setting of her breakthrough novel, “Breasts and Eggs” (published in Japan in 2008), the book that made her a feminist role model in Japan.
Her status has gone international. She followed “Breasts and Eggs” with “Heaven” (2022), which was a finalist for the International Booker Prize, and “All the Lovers in the Night” (2023), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. When Elena Ferrante released a list of her favorite 40 books by female authors, “Breasts and Eggs” was on it.
“Sisters in Yellow” takes its title from Hana’s obsession with the color, which she believes brings courage and comfort, and helps money flow in your direction. She wears yellow headbands and keeps a “yellow corner” in her living room, piled with yellow knickknacks. The corner must be dusted relentlessly.
The book opens when Hana is 40. She reads in the newspaper that Kimiko, an old friend who cared for her after Hana had been mostly abandoned by her mother, has been arrested on charges of abduction, battery and blackmail. The news floods Hana with memories of her time with Kimiko, and her own criminal past. Hana fears she may still be prosecuted. The past threatens to swamp her.
Kimiko and Hana, despite their 20-year age difference, had together run a bar called Lemon. Those years were the best of Hana’s life. She had friends at the bar; she felt part of something. She liked the mellow customers; she enjoyed the hospitality. Hot hand towels, which are ubiquitous in Japanese bars and restaurants, are mentioned so often in this novel that you finish the book half-longing for a warming machine.
Kimiko and Hana lose Lemon in a fire. Hana spends the rest of the novel trying, often by illegal methods, to earn money to restart it. The bar exists in her mind the way the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock exists in “The Great Gatsby”; it’s a symbol of a lost time, an idealized past.
Running her credit card schemes, under the tutelage of a different older woman, Hana imagines she and her friends are living in an anime series called “Attack No. 1,” about a hustling volleyball team. You sense they are unlocking achievements.
Kawakami’s novels are not unlike Theodore Dreiser’s in their realism, and at 429 pages, “Sisters in Yellow” is Dreiserian in its sprawl. The book displays a gift for confident, if rambling, storytelling, and the details pile up convincingly.
Yet the novel refused to come alive in my hands. I never felt lucky to be reading it — the ultimate test of a novel, I suppose. Kawakami’s work, at least in translation, does not have much to offer on a sentence level. Texture, depth and grainy intellection are absent. The sentences swim and skim like surface bugs.
The dialogue frequently reads as if it’s been taken from an updated version of the Nancy Drew books (I preferred them to the Hardy Boys) I read as a child: “Turn that frown upside down. Don’t look at me like that. There’s no point in worrying about something that happened so long ago it’s already basically forgotten, dead and buried.” Kawakami’s talent is wider than it is deep.
This novel drowns in thesis statements, but more than a few hit home: “Everyone gets old, and getting old means you need money, and if you get hurt or sick, that’s it. Nobody’s gonna come and save you, there’s no security in this life, just misery.”
Despite my mixed feelings about “Sisters in Yellow,” I have a feeling I won’t forget Hana, perpetually running up life’s down escalator, willing to try anything to scrape together a little happiness.
SISTERS IN YELLOW | By Mieko Kawakami | Translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio | Knopf | 430 pp. | $30
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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