How Does Sisters In Yellow End And What Does It Mean?

A quiet closure is offered at the end of ‘Sisters in Yellow’. The story is told by Hana as an adult who comes across a court document from years ago referencing someone from her past, and so she goes back in time to her teens, to her friendship with Kimiko, the founding of the bar Lemon and its small rituals of Yellow Corner etc. The fast money and high-stakes deals made at the bar bring in violence and loss of life and of people and Hana is revealed to be a complex and controlling person. The ending focuses on memory and its aftermath, rather than tying up all the loose ends and arriving at a moral. The main character survives but is still bearing the wounds of the past, and the shape of the people she lost. The novel focuses on how poverty, desire and loyalty change people, and how we keep the dead and those we have lost alive through the stories we make up about them. It’s a beautifully told novel that gave me lots to think about – especially about how faithful remembering of the past can be a shelter from it.

As I turned the pages to the end of Sisters in Yellow, I felt the passing of a long and arduous summer. There was nothing cool or quietly magnificent about the way that Hana, as an adult, discovered a court report that had thrown a name from her past into the most trenchant relief. And then, suddenly, she was a teenager again. There was Kimiko, unexpectedly dropping by Hana’s flat one day, and Hana’s almost-offhand decision to open up a tiny bar or drinking den called Lemon. As was the case with so much of what Hana had done, she had fallen into the idea almost without thinking about it, and yet Lemon had brought with it a wealth of people. Most of them loose and frangible and prone to collapse in the most serious of ways. But then there were others: a small, quirky, but ultimately trustworthy group who had, more or less, become Hana’s chosen family. And then there were the others. A bookie. Fixers of various unsavory kinds. Scammers and con artists, and those whoEdge Lemon towards them. And then the fire. And the disappearance of several of Lemon’s most regular patrons. It is all presented through the eyes of Hana as an adult. It is all remembered by her, and yet, as she recounts the events that transpired, it is clear that she is not the most reliable of narrators. She has, it seems, been obsessed by Kimiko throughout their relationship, and her devotion to the other woman has, at times, turned to outright, controlling, Manson-esque ferocity. And then there is the matter of Yellow. So much superstition and hand-washing and fetishization of luck of the green kind. Which brings its own special brand of hope to those who are struggling to make ends meet, and which provides the kind of slow poisoning that prevents them from seeing that what they are chasing is, in fact, nothing more than an illusion. In the end, all of Lemon has been reduced to near- nothing. But, Hana seems to have reached some kind of brittle, at-peace-ish state. All of the losses that she has suffered – and there have been many – still reside within her. As Kimiko taught her to do with so very many of the things that she loved. In a way, this novel is a simple and moving portrayal of how we, as humans, are able to remake ourselves after having been so very thoroughly and cruelly betrayed. This is a deeply hopeful book, and one that has left me feeling both strangely warmed, and – in equal measure – utterly and profoundly unsettled.

I read ‘Sisters in Yellow’ by Yoko cross SMALL. The novel is full of images of a small scale – Lemon’s yellow painted corner, the rows of tip jars, the smooth set-up of things and then the way things begin to deteriorate into schemes. The book begins with a rather odd legal notice in the present day which then transports us back to Hana’s childhood years spent with her Kimiko and the setting up of Lemon and subsequent gathering of other girls. However, it becomes increasingly clear that Hana and Kimiko’s methods of survival and their ‘care’ for the others set up a very unstable economy of favors. Towards the end of the book the success of the bar becomes brittle and it begins to deteriorate as the girls get involved in credit-card scams and Hana becomes embroiled with a rather unsavory bookie. It becomes increasingly apparent that Hana’s narration of past events is less than reliable as the novel progresses. Her childish portrayal of her mother becomes increasingly strict and she becomes more and more controlling of those around her. Eventually the people that she loves most begin to peel away from her. The finale of the book is not a courtroom-style judgment of those responsible for Lemon’s disappearance, nor is it a neat and packaged up mystery to be solved by the protagonist. Instead it is the non-to thrilling but, more importantly, ambiguous and realistic aftermath of the events that have occurred. An adult Hana looks back on her childhood in a rather jaundiced way and realizes that the myths and legends that she had subscribed to in order to create her chosen family of color, of luck and of fun have both saved her and betrayed her. It’s a very realistic portrayal of a chosen family and how they are fragile things in a world which doesn’t really offer up much in the way of real support or protection of its citizens.