Sisters in Yellow is a novel about friendship, betrayal, and crime on the streets of Tokyo. Hana is a teenager bored of school and fed up of her absent mother who works at a bar. When Kimiko, her mother’s friend, appears in Hana’s life, she offers an escape in the form of a new bar she’s setting up, Lemon. Now Hana has purpose, with a focus on making money with her new friends, but how far will she have to go to make and keep that wealth, and what will she think looking back on it all twenty years later, having discovered Kimiko was on trial?
I really didn’t know what to expect from this book, but having read several of Kawakami’s other novels, I wanted to give it a go. It turned out to be very much up my street in that it is really a literary take on a slow burn underworld story of crime, luck, and betrayal. Despite being quite a long book, I felt gripped throughout. It shows an almost mundane seedy side to areas of Tokyo, in which petty crime can be the only way to survive when you don’t have things like an ID or a bank account. Some of the things that happen seem larger than life, but the focus is on the characters, their mistakes, and the stories they tell themselves to justify what their actions.
This isn’t a book for anyone looking for fast-paced narrative, neat answers to questions of perspective, or likeable characters, but instead, it combines the messiness of women on the margins looking for community and safety with the world of hostess clubs and minor criminals. It felt really quite distinctive.
Fiendfully Reading 
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