Some books just stay with you, even if you can’t quite explain why. Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami will, I think, be one of those books. Kawakami has a quiet, understated prose style, and often she’s just recounting banal everyday events, but it all adds up to an immersive reading experience.

The novel is narrated by Hana, a thirty-something woman now looking back on her teenage years. She’s prompted by a news story about a criminal case against 60-year-old Kimiko Yoshikawa, who kept a vulnerable young woman locked in her apartment for two years. Hana also lived with Kimiko for a couple of years when she was young and vulnerable, and someone died. She seems to have blocked out the details, and the novel is her attempt to piece it all together.

We then jump back twenty years, from the early days of Covid-19 to the early days of the millennium, which is where most of the action in Sisters in Yellow takes place. Hana is just 15 years old and living under the absent-minded care of a mother who works in late-night dive bars and lives entirely in the present. When her mother disappears and asks her friend Kimiko to look after her for a summer, Hana starts to see for the first time in her life what it’s like to be taken care of.

So, when she gets a chance to move in with Kimiko later on, she jumps at it. They start a bar together, called Lemon, and it does well. Hana becomes the opposite of her mother, living entirely in the future, working hard and saving every yen she earns. But something always seems to thwart her plans: someone steals her box of cash, her mother needs to be bailed out after getting in debt and falling for a scam, the bar burns down. No matter how hard she tries to build a future, she’s always starting from scratch.

Hana then starts working at a low level within a crime organisation: taking a stack of fake cards that the organisation has created using stolen data, and withdrawing cash from ATMs around Tokyo. She then passes the cash on to her handler, Viv, in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. It’s easy money, and Hana works hard and accumulates more savings to reopen the bar. She brings in two friends, also young and vulnerable in different ways, to work with her and live with Kimiko.

As the money builds up, however, Hana loses sight of the goal of reopening the bar and just wants to accumulate more. She becomes controlling and abusive, creating strict house rules that she claims are necessary to keep them all safe, but her friends become increasingly resentful and the tension in the house builds.

The title “Sisters in Yellow” refers to a superstition Hana has about the colour yellow attracting money. She heard Kimiko mention it in passing, and then she went to a bookshop and looked it up, and she holds onto that fact tenaciously. It’s why the bar is called “Lemon”, and why she clings to Kimiko, who has the character for “yellow” in her name, and why she builds a kind of shrine in their house, packed with yellow objects that she’s collected from around the city.

I found this a powerful reminder of just how young Hana is and how little she knows about the world. As the narrator, she presents herself as being in charge of her life, making decisions and pursuing goals, but she is childlike in her absolute faith in this superstition. When the shrine gets dusty, she panics and lashes out at her friends who didn’t clean it. Her life is so fragile that she fears any change to the routine she’s established will destroy it.

It doesn’t occur to Hana that money has come to her not from the colour yellow but from her own agency. She doesn’t realise that she doesn’t need the shrine, and she doesn’t need Kimiko. She never really did.

And that leads us to the conclusion, which I won’t spoil except to say that it brings us back to the start of the book and raises questions over who really was in charge all along. The questions are not clearly answered, and although I have my own view, I think different readers will have different opinions about the identity of the perpetrators and the extent of the victimhood in this story, which also affects how you read the present-day criminal case against Kimiko.

Looking back over this post, I realise it may sound odd to have started it by talking about Mieko Kawakami’s understated style and the accumulation of everyday details, when actually quite a lot happens in the book: death, crime, manipulative relationships, etc. But that was my experience of Sisters in Yellow: a lot of it was bland and everyday.

A lot of the real action takes place off-stage, and what we see are the conversations, the aftermath, Hana’s thoughts and worries. Even the crime is dull: we get pages and pages of info dump about how card scams work, and then Hana and her friends go out and take out money from ATMs, again and again and again. It’s a bit like reading a description of a DoorDash driver’s routine.

It’s a tough book to quote from because there isn’t really any beautiful prose to speak of. So why did it work? It really shouldn’t, based on what I just wrote. I think it’s because of the characters and the relationships, the constant questions over what’s really happening and how much we can rely on this narrator, the confusion over how it relates to Kimiko’s criminal case in the present day. There’s so much to think about, and the bland, repetitive prose and everyday events and conversations have a lulling effect from which occasional lines like “How did people go on living?” give you a sharp jolt.

I’m still not entirely convinced by my reasons for liking Sisters in Yellow, but I did like it, and it will stay with me. Make of that what you will. I’d love to hear other opinions to help me make better sense of it. Leave a comment down below.

I wrote this post for Japanese Literature Challenge 19, hosted by Dolce Bellezza, so head over there for more reviews and discussion of Japanese books. You can also read my reviews of a couple of Kawakami’s previous novels, Ms Ice Sandwich and Breasts and Eggs.