{"id":3447,"date":"2026-11-08T19:11:21","date_gmt":"2026-11-09T03:11:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3447"},"modified":"2026-11-08T19:11:21","modified_gmt":"2026-11-09T03:11:21","slug":"review-sisters-in-yellow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3447","title":{"rendered":"Review: Sisters in Yellow"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Los Angeles public library has led me to a bunch of interesting and different Japanese fiction over the past couple years and<em> <\/em>Mieko Kawakami&#8217;s <em>Sisters in Yellow<\/em> is the latest.  It&#8217;s a difficult book to drop into a genre.  There is plenty of crime and it takes place at the edges of Japan&#8217;s criminal underground.  There&#8217;s a coming of age story in there, of sorts.  There&#8217;s basis for some kind of activist fiction like <em>The Jungle<\/em>, but it&#8217;s not explicit.  And may not be present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What is there is a completely gripping narrative told from the point of view of an unreliable but completely believable narrator.  This is the story of a girl growing into adulthood on the fringes of society.  She&#8217;s less a mobster&#8217;s daughter and more Richard Pryor.  She grows up alongside generally shady goings on, but she&#8217;s never actively harming anyone. In her mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And her mind is absolutely the core of the story.  There&#8217;s a framing sequence that asks a question that seems to have a clear answer.  But not to her, which drives her remembrance which takes up much of the novel.  She&#8217;s an obviously unreliable narrator, but even looking in from the outside, there is a lot that is not black and white.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think this is a book where some readers will look at the question that the framing sequence asks and have strong opinions of the answer.  Since that question is pretty close to &#8220;was this person held hostage and forced into a criminal enterprise by a woman twenty years her elder?&#8221; it seems like there should be an answer.  But I can build arguments both ways.  I suspect the litmus test of it is part of the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And there&#8217;s much more in there than a puzzle.  Have a look for yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A must.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Los Angeles public library has led me to a bunch of interesting and different Japanese fiction over the past couple years and Mieko Kawakami&#8217;s Sisters in Yellow is the latest. It&#8217;s a difficult book to drop into a genre. There is plenty of crime and it takes place at the edges of Japan&#8217;s criminal [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3447"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3448,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3447\/revisions\/3448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}