Mieko Kawakami: Sisters in Yellow
The International Booker Prize-shortlisted author presents her bold noir thriller set in Tokyo’s underbelly, in conversation with Georgina Godwin.
Kimiko Yoshikawa, a 60-year-old woman, is on trial for holding a girl in captivity for many years. When Hana stumbles across a newspaper account of this shocking crime, her steady life begins to unravel.
As Hana dredges up memories of her fraught adolescence, the novel takes us back to the late 1990s – a time of economic upheaval that cast the have-nots, like Hana and Kimiko, into society’s dark underbelly. Struggling to survive in a merciless society that preys on the weak, Hana is forced to make choices that will scar her for life.
Kawakami is the author of the internationally bestselling novel, Breasts and Eggs, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and one of TIME’s top ten books of 2020.
Georgina Godwin is a broadcast journalist and podcast presenter for various outlets, including the in-depth author interview programme Meet the Writers and the award-winning current affairs geo-politics show The Globalist on Monocle Radio, where she is books editor. She is on the board of the charity English PEN and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Presented in association with The Japan Foundation.
Need to know
Georgina Godwin
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