Sisters in Yellow

Mieko Kawakami’s Sisters in Yellow captures 1990s Tokyo from the perspective of a young woman trying to eke out a living in nightlife and shady businesses. It’s narrated about twenty years later, around the time of the pandemic, as she looks back on her late teens working at a bar called Yellow and then withdrawing money from cloned bank cards.

It seems there were a lot of writers, both Japanese and gaijin, writing during Covid about 90s Japan, and Tokyo in particular. Reading Kawakami’s novel I was brought back to things that were in the news or popular at the time, like green lemon soda topped with a vanilla blob, bosozoku biker gangs, baccarat and gambling dens, X Japan, Y2K, the Kobe earthquake, real estate fraud, the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attacks, purikura, tamagotchi, flip phones, youth-driven subcultures like kogyaru, restless teenagers hanging out at McDonald’s, and the feel of Shibuya and Ginza when these places had edgier vibes and faster pulses. Much of this, though, serves simply to establish setting and era rather than drive the plot. The story itself focuses on a few young women scheming to make more yen, with Hana’s seeming naivety and paranoia running throughout.

Hana is the narrator, and Kawakami almost gets away with having a believable but not especially adept storyteller carry this long rambling story. It’s too bad Hana didn’t take some creative writing classes when she straightened out her life; Kawakami might then have tightened the tale. It really doesn’t need to be 448 pages. The first hundred or so make you want to read on, and I liked the final chapter too, but much of what comes between feels stretched out and noirishly promises something the book ultimately doesn’t deliver.

I’m glad I read it, or parts of it, but once is enough. It did make me remember aspects of what Tokyo was like back then, and how a lot of young women in this city seemed worse off than young women have it now, in terms of job prospects, financial security, and their standing in a male-dominated society.