Dear readers, There’s a lot to admire about the Japanese novelist Mieko Kawakami — her characters on the fringe of society, her depictions of emotions or experiences many find shameful, her alertness to the spectral threat of misogyny. She’s also something of a quote machine in interviews, at least according to this 2023 profile of her. I had to laugh at one line: “I’m not an Olympic athlete,” she said. “Literature doesn’t represent anything.” How refreshing to encounter a writer who’s just as interesting off the page as on it! In her novels “Breasts and Eggs” and “All the Lovers in the Night,” she wrote about women grappling with poverty, body dysmorphia, loneliness and existential despair, and became something of an international phenomenon. But “I got tired of being called a feminist author,” she said, so she developed a male protagonist for her book “Heaven.” Kawakami’s new book, “Sisters in Yellow,” could be called her first crime novel. She once described it as “my version of ‘The Makioka Sisters,’” referring to Junichiro Tanizaki’s classic about a family in prewar Osaka whose fortunes are in decline, and the touchstone is a useful one. When we meet Hana, she’s a teenager who’s been all but abandoned by her flighty mother. Kimiko, one of her mother’s friends, feels like an older sister and an anchor; eventually Hana moves in with her and the pair start a dive bar. Sam Bett and David Boyd, who translated Kawakami’s previous novels, didn’t work on “Sisters in Yellow,” and I missed their sure touch. But Kawakami is always worth paying attention to. As our critic Dwight Garner wrote in his review this week, “I have a feeling I won’t forget Hana, perpetually running up life’s down escalator, willing to try anything to scrape together a little happiness.” See you on Friday.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Love this email? Forward to a friend. Want this email? Sign-up here. Have a suggestion for this email? Then send us a note at books@nytimes.com.
|
