黄色い家
(Kiiroi Ie)
by 川上 未映子 (Meiko Kawakami)
Author: 川上 未映子 (Meiko Kawakami)
Japanese Level: JLPT N2
Genre: Human drama(?)
Pages: 608
Bookwalker Japan: 黄色い家
Japanese Summary
2020年春、惣菜店に勤める花は、ニュース記事に黄美子の名前を見つける。
60歳になった彼女は、若い女性の監禁・傷害の罪に問われていた。
長らく忘却していた20年前の記憶――黄美子と、少女たち2人と疑似家族のように暮らした日々。
まっとうに稼ぐすべを持たない花たちは、必死に働くがその金は無情にも奪われ、よりリスキーな〝シノギ〞に手を出す。歪んだ共同生活は、ある女性の死をきっかけに瓦解へ向かい……。
善と悪の境界に肉薄する、今世紀最大の問題作！
English Summary (translation by Japanese Talk Online)
It’s the spring of 2020. Delicatessen employee Hana sees the name Kimiko in a news article.
The 60-year-old woman had been accused of imprisoning and abusing young women.
Hana reaches back into the 20-year-old memories she’d repressed…of when she and Kimiko lived together in their pseudo-family. They didn’t have any way to earn an honest living, so Hana throws herself into work where money steals away her emotions until she finally comes into more risky work for organized crime. And their twisted lives comes to a head when a young woman dies…
The most controversial story of the century, fleshing out the boundary between good and evil!
Why You Should (Not) Read 黄色い家
I wanted to like this book. I really did. The premise of a young woman who turns to a life of crime to survive and then someone dies?! This made me think of novels like Out by Natsuo Kirino. I had the impression the main character would get involved with some shady people, get in over her head, and everything would culminate in a dramatic finale.
That’s…not what happens……at all.
If you don’t want spoilers, I suggest you stop reading here.
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The novel starts in the future with the main character, Hana, a lot older. She sees in the news the woman who ran the Yellow House, Kimiko, was on trial for forcefully imprisoning some girls. The begging heavily implies the main character was the Yellow House along with some other girls by the woman taking care of them. It hints that something terrible happened and now they’re all trying to forget about it and live their lives.
What actually happens is…not that. They were never forced or tricked into living in the Yellow House by Kimiko. In fact, she doesn’t do anything…at all. She spends the whole book doing nothing besides watching TV and drinking.
Hana and a few other girls help run a hostess club run by Kimiko and eventually turn to credit card fraud, but they never get involved in the yakuza or anyone really dangerous. They never step more than a toe into the criminal underbelly of Japan.
Nothing really bad happens to the characters and they’re able to do things with relative ease. There is a fire, but it wasn’t premeditated arson, it just happened. The main character goes crazy and then they all leave the house. Even the “woman’s death” hinted in the blurb happens off screen and isn’t resolved in any interesting way.
Basically, there’s no conflict that drives this novel.
—
I kept thinking of Yazuka Moon by Shoko Tendo, the true story of a young woman who grew up in a yakuza family. Things get really effed up in that book (CW: drugs, assault, murder, suicide). The criminal world is very dangerous, but none of that is addressed in this novel.
It’s like the author wanted to look at how poverty drives people to crime but only on a surface level. She never looks at a lot of realistic issues that young women face when getting involved in crime in Japan.
The main character, Hana, is arguably the main instigator but she doesn’t realize what she’s doing is wrong. There are no consequences for her actions. She doesn’t learn any lessons. She just keeps going through life and then conveniently forgets that she’s bat-shit crazy and blames it all on Kimiko? Again, it felt very shallow.
I’m surprised this novel was nominated for so many awards, but then again, そしてバトルを渡す (Soshite Baton wo Watasu) was similarly very shallow and nonsensical but won a bunch of awards.
Why Japanese Learners Might Read 黄色い家
If you’re still interested in reading this novel I’d say it’s good for N2~N1 level Japanese learners. There’s a lot of good vocabulary used by adults and long paragraphs with lots of advanced grammar. So it’s good reading comprehension.
There’s also an audiobook if you want to listen while you read and practice your listening.
If you’re still interested in reading this in Japanese, you can try the first few pages on Bookwalker.
Summary
To be honest, 黄色い家 was one of the worst Japanese novels I read in 2024.
I picked up this novel because it was on the shortlist for the booksellers award and the premise sounded interesting. If I had known it was written by the author of Breast and Eggs I wouldn’t have bought it. Which was another surface level nonsensical story where characters never talked and things just happened. (With a terrible English translation.) If you liked Breast and Eggs or any of her other books then maybe you’d like this one.
If you want to read good stories about women getting involved in organized crime in Japan then read Out or Yakuza Moon instead.
Other Book You Might Like
Four Otaku Women in a House Share (オタク女子が、４人で暮らしてみたら。)
Shoot the Enemy, Comrade (同志少女よ、敵を撃て)