Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio, features a teenager named Hana who becomes determined to earn a life for herself, despite not having credit, an id, or any support from her poor mother, and sets out with an older woman named Kimiko to do so, slowly getting involved in Tokyo's seedier underbelly of scams and grifters.
Kawakami has mentioned one of her biggest inspirations is Dostoevsky, contributing to her distinctive long passages and monologues, and here, to the interiority of a story about poverty and one young person's desperation to endure. Hana is young and naive, raised sheltered in a home where her mother simply keeps money day-to-day in a tin. Her unreliability as a narrator is marked: are things as simple as she describes, or is she failing to pick up on a social cue or understanding? Her belief in yellow and the power of feng shui to bring them fortune is a crutch she leans on desperately; raised the only child of a poor woman who gave her no safety, security, or reliability, she sees money as the only way to calm her endless anxiety about her future. Other people's failure to think as much about the need to save and guarantee their future puzzles her.
The book does drag somewhat in the middle, and (like many books in recent years) I firmly believe it could have been shorter without doing any damage to the tone or plot. That said, the twisting of relationships, Hana's slow descent, the questions raised about poverty, money, and security, and the compelling and sticky images of yellow, are all compelling, and I never considered putting it down. Also fun to have an (implied) asexual protagonist. All around, an exciting new novel from Kawakami that in some ways reminded me of Min Jin Lee's Free Food for Millionaires.
Content warnings for substance abuse, sucidal ideation, domestic abuse, child neglect, grief, fatphobia mention.
