The action in Booker Prize-shortlisted author Mieko Kawakami’s fourth novel to be translated into English, Sisters in Yellow, centers on Hana Ito, a ’90s-era latchkey kid living in comparative poverty in Higashimurayama, a Tokyo suburb. With an absent father and a mother whose parenting style falls somewhere between detached and deranged, Hana dreams of escaping the drudgery of school and home life. When her mother’s 35-year-old friend Kimiko offers her a chance to live in the big city, Hana abandons both high school and what’s left of her biological family without so much as a second thought.
Kimiko and Hana wind up opening a bar called Lemon, a moniker chosen partially because the color yellow signifies prosperity in feng shui. With Kimiko and a couple of other teens who work at the bar part time, Hana creates something of a replacement family, even to the point where the quartet rents a house together.
Then calamity strikes, and the foursome is suddenly in need of an additional income stream, and quickly. One of Lemon’s regulars, a longtime friend of Kimiko’s and a bit of a shady character, introduces Hana to a business associate who can help her generate that income. But there’s a cost, and that’s when the book shifts into high gear.
Hana finds herself in a position of having to make choices no 17-year-old should have to confront, and the story, told largely in an extended flashback, is framed by the adult Hana questioning whether she was actually making those choices herself or being manipulated into them.
Part coming-of-age novel, part crime story, part commentary on poverty, responsibility, relationships and survival, Sisters in Yellow asks uncomfortable questions and gives uncomfortable answers, burrowing deep into the psyches of not only its protagonist but also its potential audience. The truths it exposes are largely a consequence of the lens through which they are viewed, and patterns keep repeating themselves . . . until they don’t.