SISTERS IN YELLOW

Four women make increasingly dire compromises to get ahead in Tokyo.

Kawakami’s latest is narrated by Hana Ito, who in early 2020 comes across a news story about an old friend and maternal figure, Kimiko Yoshikawa. Kimiko has been charged with kidnapping and abusing a young woman, a story that sparks uneasy memories for Hana of two decades prior. Hana was 15 when she met Kimiko in the late 1990s; Hana’s mother and Kimiko both worked at the same nightclub, and as Hana’s mother became increasingly negligent (allowing a boyfriend to steal money from Hana, for instance), Kimiko stepped in. Clinging to her kindness, Hana moves in with Kimiko and together they make plans to open a bar of their own, called Lemon. (In the feng shui books Hana obsessively reads, yellow is associated with financial good fortune.) In time, Hana befriends and eventually hires two young women, Momoko Tamamori, estranged from her wealthy family, and Ran Kato, a beauty school student. Lemon succeeds—Hana offers detailed income updates—until it doesn’t, and as financial pressures mount, Hana appeals to a bookie with mob ties for help; soon, with the help of an associate named Vivien, she finds what seems a lucrative option. Kawakami’s story is a straightforward study of female friendship and how readily it’s undermined, usually by men; fathers are absent or distant, and boyfriends are uniformly bad news. But there’s plenty of self-sabotage to go around as well. Taylor and Yoshio smoothly translate the story, which has a grim arc of inevitability. But, given how clear-cut the crisis is, the novel feels overlong. Each woman is challenged in her own way, but since Hana’s perspective is the only one given, other characters’ struggles don’t have the same depth.

An ambitious, imperfectly executed tale of tested sisterhood.