SISTERS IN YELLOW, exploring women's wrongs in Women's History Month

SISTERS IN YELLOW
MIEKO KAWAKAMI (tr. Laurel Taylor & Hitomi Yoshio)
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: Rising star Mieko Kawakami reaches new heights in this pacy, thrilling novel, a Japanese Breaking Bad, in which a group of friends fight for freedom, independence, and survival in Tokyo of the 1990s, a world rapidly dividing into haves and have-nots.

All of them are fleeing something. Growing up without a father, Hana’s tired of the pity in her classmates’ eyes, and finds a flashier mother figure in Kimiko. Kimiko is older than Hana's mother but seems much younger, chatting easily about school and boys and wanting a better life. Fate throws them together with two more young women—bruised but not broken by life. Together the four set out to remake their lives, fighting predatory lenders, organized criminals, and plain bad luck as they open a bar called Lemon.

Keeping the business going, and trying to take care of each other, forms the core of this enrapturing novel. It is a story of startling reversals and vivid portraits of the matriarchy of Tokyo nightlife and its adjacent criminal underclasses. From the bar owners to the aging hostesses to the young street touts coaxing people off the street to places like Lemon, everyone wants a chance at renewal, but can everyone get it?

Narrated by Hana in Kawakami’s trademark evocatively poetic style and paced like a noir, Sisters in Yellow will be the literary blockbuster of the season. This epic of friendship and betrayal is the kind of book one longs to return to when away from a world until itself, and a book that makes you think while it produces immensities of feeling. It is a major novel that, like so many of the best recent phenomena—from Donna Tartt to Hanya Yanigahara—explores how we survive (or don't) together.

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My Review: What if someone who liked noir novels thought, "let's make the women the active partners, and add overtly emotional tropes to a fear of abandonment-fueled story?"

Meet Mieko Kawakami.

The emotional stakes are huge. Hana, our PoV character, remembers the events of her teenaged life when she was seen, valued, and trained by Kimiko, an older woman with...situational...morals and a very large store of useful knowlegdge whose origins a sensible person would not pry into. As Hana is a completely neglected child of an emotionally absent mother and no visible father, Kimiko's louche lifestyle carries the allure of being chosen, paid attention to, seen as valuable for once...though her value makes older, more experienced readers shudder a little for what's likely to happen to her as she gains her experience points in the Dungeons and Dragons game of life.

Unlike man-centered noirs, this story is less about the crimes the gruesome twosome at the center of the story commit with their scoobygroup; more about how they, by working in tandem, learn things from each other and by making mistakes entirely new to each of them. We don't often get stories like this from Japanese writers, or at least not translated into English. These are hardscrabble folk, no expectation they'll be taken care of by the system. They're women, so of lesser value in their society no matter what they need from it; they are not likely to get much in any case. It sets the stakes of their efforts to make a living very high indeed. I'm impressed at Author Kawakami's willingness to have her women suffer for their mistakes, as well as fight to get what they need from an indifferent world.

But at least they're all in it together as the Japanese economy contracts post-1980s bubble. They're all grafting hard, grifting when they must, but they have each other's backs.

Oh dear.

No lesson without pain; every birth must have blood. Hana, now an adult, relives her hard growing up of schemes and crimes, when she sees Kimiko's name in the news as a blackmailer; it's no surprise, but it's a painful jolt of relived trauma nonetheless. Hana's insecurity has always led her into money traps. It's no surprise her insecurity is alive and well. of course it's not because her entire life is built on the reality of betrayal from neglectful mothering on to her time with chosen mother figure Kimiko.

It's not on the same craft level as the magisterial Breasts and Eggs. Pages spent explaining things now common knowledge are wasted space and/or padding. The noir/crime aspect of the story, so tonally important, assorts oddly with the flashback structure; is there tension meant to lead us on when it's obvious Hana survived her past reasonably intact?

It's a good read but not a perfect one. I'll recommend you check it out of the library, but do get your head around how young women do very seedy things without being forced by men into them. Celebrate Women's Wrongs this Women's History Month.

SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO, so very timely; so very deep; not very lovable

SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO
RIE QUDAN (tr. Jesse Kirkwood)
Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The award-winning, bestselling Japanese phenomenon: a speculative, prophetic novel following a young and brilliant celebrity architect in Tokyo who takes on her most controversial project yet—perfect for readers of Klara and the Sun and Chain-Gang All-Stars.

Welcome to the Japan of tomorrow. Here, the practice of radical sympathy toward criminals has become normalized. The incarcerated are considered victims influenced by their environments to commit crime and are labeled accordingly as Homo miserabilis.

A grand, yet controversial, skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo is planned to house lawbreakers in compassionate comfort—Sympathy Tower Tokyo. Acclaimed architect Sara Machina has been tasked with designing the city’s new centerpiece but is filled with doubt. Haunted by a terrible crime she experienced as a young girl, she wonders if she might inherently disagree with the values of the project, which should be the pinnacle of her career. As Sara grapples with these conflicting emotions, her relationship with her gorgeous—and much younger—boyfriend grows increasingly strained. In search of solace and in need of creative inspiration, Sara turns to the knowing words of an AI chatbot…

The recipient of Japan’s highest literary prize, Sympathy Tower Tokyo is an extraordinary novel from one of the most exciting new global voices. Partly inspired by conversations with an artificial intelligence, it offers an urgent and brilliant defense of the power of language written by humans, a moving exploration of the imaginative impulse, and an often hilarious send-up of our modern world’s unrelenting conformity.

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My Review: Short, intense, very very Japanese.

What do I mean by that?

This I liked less—his tendency to mansplain things I hadn't actually asked about. Was his smooth, polite facade really just an attempt to mask his greatest flaw—that he was, at heart, illiterate? For all his computational might, it seemed Al-built didn't have the strength to face up to his own weakness. He'd become so used to stealing the words of others without repercussion that he felt no shame, had no awareness even, of his own ignorance. The question of how humans had learned to use the word "discrimination," of the ordeals that had led us to it and which of us had suffered through them, was of no interest to him. He was incapable of curiosity. He did not thirst for knowledge.

"He", as you might surmise from context, is an LLM, or as we persist in calling them, an "AI", which does not exist...yet. There was a kerfuffle about the author using AI in writing a novel largely about AI that even the usually sensible Guardian sensationalized. Well, having read the piece at the link, the reasoning for doing what she did makes sense to me, and the hype likely did no harm to her sales. Not that this was likely...the deeply prestigious Akutagawa Prize gave this story its nod (and a million yen) in 2023. The Prize has gone to some excellent works available in English (see the list at the link) so I feel little concern for this affecting Rie Qudan's career taking off into the stratosphere.

Should it have done?

Sympathy Tower Tokyo would throw our language into disarray; it would tear the world apart. Not because, dizzy with our architectural prowess, we had reached too close to heaven and enraged the gods, but because we had begun to abuse language, to bend and stretch and break it as we each saw fit, so that before long no one could understand what anyone else was saying.

I think this novel's premise...what the hell do we do about AI in regard to the needs of humans...is not only timely but the angle chosen is so perfectly suited to my concerns it's like she got it from my head. I am, in other words, The Platonic Ideal of her reader. Sara Machina has my sympathetic attention from jump. She's ambitious, intellectually curious, and has strong opinions about language, its use, and its power.

Also, her boyfriend is gorgeous and twenty-five years younger than she is.

You go, girl.

Sara is, in this book-2026, in a different world from ours but only just. It's clear that the author chose to differentiate book-Tokyo from ours enough to enable we-the-readers to feel our real feelings but not pour them over, or incorporate them into, out-of-book reality. Sara's designing the titular structure, a prison-cum-asylum, and is conflicted about its kindly parameters versus its actual intent. (The synopsis clarifies this if you have not read it yet.) Sara also has some extremely Japanese concerns that require significant explanation to the US reader, regarding Japanese writing: transliterating foreign language is usually done using sound-characters called "katakana" to mimic the sound of the foreign word, instead of the Chinese import ideograms called "kanji".

Many are the switched-off brains, reaching absently for the browser tab next in line. I want you to know that it's not just fuss-and-feathers preciousness. It genuinely adds a layer of understanding to the heart of the book, the need to use language in ways appropriate to a given task; to use language as a human, conveying layer after layer of meaning, commentary, information plus context, all very much at the heart of Large Language Models and their masquerade as Artificial General Intelligence. The AGI you hear so much about is not there yet, it's still LLM, and see the first quote for why that very much matters in 2025. The algorithms are very sophisticated, the processing power is behind their use is *staggering* but generative and creative is not available. Yet.

Quite a lot of this read was only subtly conveyed. I went off to do research after it, because my spidey-senses told me there was a lot more to this than meets the eye. There was. Do I think that will give everyone the pleasure in poking around the internet that it did me? No. Will the read be as pleasant for those less thirsty for data than I am? Yes. The bone of speculative storytelling that pokes through is more than involving enough, the parallels among all the ways humans create, use, abuse the structures they create to help, harm, hurt, elucidate...all readily available without digging any deeper than the text.

I don't know if large numbers of speculative fiction/alternate-history readers will cotton on to those elements thus find the book; others put off by those elements will see them clearly and not like that they weren't informed they were in for that. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics occurring on schedule will throw some. A few will see the Zaha Hadid connection without prompting, but I was not one; I wish I had known in advance because I'm a giant nerd and would've savored the effect of that knowledge on my read. The in-text mentions of her sent me searching; better I should've had an endnote.

So you see why I gave no fifth star. I'm glad I read the book; I think it deserved the Akutagawa Prize; the way the author used Chat to enhance the text fails to rouse my readily roused ire should say a lot; but in the end I think this is a read I admired more than loved.

DAYS AT THE MORISAKI BOOKSHOP, charming bestseller set in a bookshop

DAYS AT THE MORISAKI BOOKSHOP
SATOSHI YAGISAWA (tr. Eric Ozawa)
Harper Perennial
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: a generous 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The moving international sensation about new beginnings, human connection, and the joy of reading.

Hidden in Jimbocho, Tokyo, is a booklover's paradise. On a quiet corner in an old wooden building lies a shop filled with hundreds of second-hand books.

Twenty-five-year-old Takako has never liked reading, although the Morisaki bookshop has been in her family for three generations. It is the pride and joy of her uncle Satoru, who has devoted his life to the bookshop since his wife Momoko left him five years earlier.

When Takako's boyfriend reveals he's marrying someone else, she reluctantly accepts her eccentric uncle's offer to live rent-free in the tiny room above the shop. Hoping to nurse her broken heart in peace, Takako is surprised to encounter new worlds within the stacks of books lining the Morisaki bookshop.

As summer fades to autumn, Satoru and Takako discover they have more in common than they first thought. The Morisaki bookshop has something to teach them both about life, love, and the healing power of books.

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My Review: A book about books, and a bookshop, and the gentle art of connecting to others in the broken places life inflicts on us? A non-reader learning the power of books, and stories, to help and heal and bring us together? Sign me up!

You get all of that in this internationally bestselling novel. It is exactly correctly marketed, and aimed directly at the book-gollum that lurks in your #Booksgiving circle...the mid-teens niece who gobbles the usual suspects of YA fiction, the later tween granddaughter who needs a fresh subject to care passionately about. The reader who is also a bookaholic is likely to get less from it than a newer reader, as this is largely well-traveled territory for most of us over a certain age; still enjoyable, certainly, and so short that it's a long sitting of reading.

I've just been here before quite often. Moods and atmosphere make for fun experiences of reading and Jimbocho, in a few deft strokes feels real. Why then am I recommending it for your teen bookeaters? It's...fine. It's not more than fine, but it's solidly...fine. I reserve phrases like "good enough" to damn with faint praise. This is..fine. Sitting around with one's less than riveting relatives of a Yuletide eve, this is the best kind of read to have, and so to give to someone who's in that situation.

Coping with heartbreak is always going to appeal to younger audiences. They experience so much of it. The nature of Takako's dumping by her pretty rotten boyfriend is going to appeal; the nature of Satoru and Motoko's estrangement will certainly raise a lot of tissues.

Finding Family within one's family is a rare and wonderful experience. I think the story is a hit around the world for a very clear reason. Get it into the right hands and it will make the Yuletide bright, shiny, and bearable.

THE PACHINKO PARLOR, 2nd novel from Korean French author about Japanese colonialism ***SPOILERS***

THE PACHINKO PARLOR
ÉLISA SHUA DUSAPIN (tr. Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
Open Letter (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The days are beginning to draw in. The sky is dark by seven in the evening. I lie on the floor and gaze out of the window. Women’s calves, men’s shoes, heels trodden down by the weight of bodies borne for too long.

It is summer in Tokyo. Claire finds herself dividing her time between tutoring twelve-year-old Mieko, in an apartment in an abandoned hotel, and lying on the floor at her grandparents: daydreaming, playing Tetris and listening to the sounds from the street above. The heat rises; the days slip by.

The plan is for Claire to visit Korea with her grandparents. They fled the civil war there over fifty years ago, along with thousands of others, and haven’t been back since. When they first arrived in Japan, they opened Shiny, a pachinko parlor. Shiny is still open, drawing people in with its bright, flashing lights and promises of good fortune. And as Mieko and Claire gradually bond, a tender relationship growing, Mieko’s determination to visit the pachinko parlor builds.

The Pachinko Parlor is a nuanced and beguiling exploration of identity and otherness, unspoken histories, and the loneliness you can feel amongst family. Crisp and enigmatic, Shua Dusapin’s writing glows with intelligence.

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My Review: I'm aware of two things about this read, two very strong responses that wouldn't be elicited by any other read I've encountered this year: 1) Food looms very, very large in my experience of a story. This book, it's Claire and her inability to enjoy any food she encounters in Japan. 2) Author Shua Dusapin builds very intricate clockworks of interdependent imagery to support her stories of women without pleasure in the worlds they're in. The recurring fish-object images in this book join Winter in Sokcho's cold, echoing spaces. I mean, when a child's desire to act on the world is performed in explicit imitation of a cleaner fish, and a train pulling into a station summons from its immensity and speed the idea of a fish in Claire, our main character, then the author's going about her business with a degree of bravura that demands to be noted. As to whether it worked, I cannot say. I noticed it...I never thought of not noticing it...but derived nothing but the most facile conclusions from its obviousness. Me, or the choice? A case is readily made for either.

Claire's visit to her Korean grandparents, whose lives have taken them to batten on the economic lifeblood of their erstwhile colonizers, is always...off. Claire has little knowledge of Korean to offer in her attempts to connect with them. None of them deign to speak Japanese among themselves. So, to skirt around the grandparental reticence with their native language (a reticence they did not demonstrate with Claire's Swiss boyfriend, she notes) and still manage to communicate, they use English. Another colonial tongue...one associated in Korea with the US...another occupying power, though perhaps more palatable (!) because it's used by the Japanese's modern overlords.

Pachinko earns profits for her Korean grandparents...the only legal way for Japanese to gamble, or Koreans to earn...Japan making an apology for its colonial past? Or simply making it obvious who the vampires sucking the country's vice income into themselves are. Both...either...not for nothing is Japan's food disagreeable to Claire. Its artifice (a description of a raspberry atop a dessert was so revolting I had to put the book down:

I look down at my tart. A single raspberry glistens atop a lump of whipped cream. Compact and rubbery-looking. I pick up my knife, cut the tart into sections and start eating. It tastes fatty. I spit it out into my napkin. The raspberry stares up at me, still intact, coated in a film of jelly.

...it made something lush and luscious sound so unheathily slimy!) is removed from nature, is devoid of dirt or even signs of human hands in its preparation...something very Japanese about that. And Claire's not having it inside her, not willingly anyway.

Mieko serves as Claire's out, her means of contributing something to this life she's temporarily trapped in (it's a visit, not an emigration!) and unhappily isolated within. Mieko is a young Japanese girl whose mother hires Claire to teach French. (Which is odd, given the mother's fluency...permaybehaps seeking a genuinely French accent? from a Swiss Korean?) Mieko's, um, a little odd. Her ordinary-kid desires, eg going to theme parks or eating, are all as not-Japanese as is Claire's role in her life of teaching her a European language. Mieko is for Claire, unsurprisingly, the friend whose strangeness meets one's own in silent weirdo communion.

Claire's main failing as a character is simply that she is so passive. She drifts, she causes nothing to happen...teaching Mieko French and acting as her escort to theme parks aren't things Claire causes or even proposes...and, in the end, her presence changes nothing. The grandparents she's there to visit aren't communicative, make no demands and accept no role in the granddaughter who came around the world to enable a much-mooted visit to Korea for them's life while she's there. The visit itself, a "return" to a country that the grandparents left before there was a North or a South or an American- or Chinese-backed state, is...inconclusive. Did it happen? We aren't vouchsafed that information...Claire's climbing a gangway, thinking her grandparents are behind her...and they aren't.

What makes me not-best-pleased about that ending, that tunnel Claire's climbing to visit a place she's not been to, she's there to allow others to experience before they die...is the fact that it does nothing like an ending to resolve the family's generational hurts. It's a story about a disintegrating family's stop at a roadside attraction on its way somewhere and suddenly the stop's over but not everyone's in the car.

It is, in other words, a bit too much like Winter in Sokcho to be ignored. That tale's very French-feeling plot of plotlessness as families unite around the goal of making everyone feel as miserable as possible worked because it was the author's introduction to the Anglophone reading world. It's no less beautifully wrapped in sentences here, the imagery is lovely, but...it's not my first trip to the well.

I am glad I read this story. I am eager to see what else the author has in mind for me to read in future. I hope it will ring more than a change of scenery on the story next time. Once was enough; twice a bit troublesome; no more now, if you please.