Review: Sisters in Yellow
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’s Sisters in Yellow is the latest. It’s a difficult book to drop into a genre. There is plenty of crime and it takes place at the edges of Japan’s criminal underground. There’s a coming of age story in there, of sorts. There’s basis for some kind of activist fiction like The Jungle, but it’s not explicit. And may not be present.
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’s less a mobster’s daughter and more Richard Pryor. She grows up alongside generally shady goings on, but she’s never actively harming anyone. In her mind.
And her mind is absolutely the core of the story. There’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’s an obviously unreliable narrator, but even looking in from the outside, there is a lot that is not black and white.
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 “was this person held hostage and forced into a criminal enterprise by a woman twenty years her elder?” 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.
And there’s much more in there than a puzzle. Have a look for yourself.
A must.