India, Sept. 2 -- If there's one thing Mieko Kawakami, author of Breasts and Eggs and All the Lovers in the Night, among others, is good at conjuring, it is a particular kind of unease. Not the obviously dramatic, door-slamming kind, but the quieter sort that settles into a room and simply refuses to leave. Sisters in Yellow, her first full plunge into noir, carries that unease from its opening page to its last, even when very little appears to be happening on the surface.

The novel opens with Hana, now in her forties, stumbling upon a news report about a woman she once lived with, who has been arrested for assault, intimidation, and illegal confinement. From there, the book folds back into the 1990s, into a teenage Hana scraping by in a...