A gritty noir page-turner weaving together family, money, and crime, Mieko Kawakami’s Sisters in Yellow follows a girl as she sheds the shackles of her upbringing and seeks to break free from soul-crushing poverty. Underneath lies a probing exploration of human dignity and ethics—a depth that gave Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs and Heaven their emotional heft. Our lives may appear to be the product of the choices we make, but the truth is not so simple. Fate and chance pull the strings, forcing people to live moment to moment without the luxury of free choice. How do we see the world around us? What kind of ethical compass can we rely on?
Sisters in Yellow begins in April 2020 with the protagonist Hana finding a news article about the trial of Kimiko Yoshikawa, a 60-year-old woman accused of assault and false imprisonment in Shinjuku. Reading the account, Hana begins to recall memories that she had been trying to forget for more than twenty years. She remembers her late teens, living with Kimiko and two girls her own age, Momoko and Ran, on the fringes, the four of them clinging together as a makeshift family. The moment descends on her without warning, an unwelcome visitor from the past. With the COVID-19 pandemic spreading, she reaches out to Ran for the first time in two decades. When the two meet, Ran tells Hana to leave the past in the past—and Kawakami then takes the narrative back into the last century.
Hana first meets Kimiko one summer day at the age of 15. At the time, Hana is living with her mom in an old two-room, wood-built tenement in Higashimurayama, a spot on the outskirts of Tokyo. Hana’s dad is all but absent from her life, and her mom—a hostess—is working almost every night. All Hana has to live on is the money her mom randomly stashes in a can when she happens to think of it, never one to actually save for anything. Her classmates start to look at her with a tinge of pity in their eyes. That’s when Kimiko enters the picture. Two years younger than Hana’s mom, Kimiko shows up at the tenement and enters Hana’s life, filling the void left by her mother. As Hana talks to Kimiko, she’s able to open up about her own feelings with somebody for the first time. She talks to Kimiko about all kinds of things: money, life at school, life at home, her mother. Soon she begins to fantasize about living with Kimiko from now on — yet after about a month, Kimiko disappears, and their time together comes to an abrupt end. Hana starts high school and gets a part-time job at a local chain restaurant, but the memories of her time with Kimiko, someone who kept her fed and cared about her, are always at the back of her mind. She throws herself into her job; making her own decent living becomes her identity, turning from a means of simply getting by to a purpose in life—and then one day, her mom’s boyfriend Slo-Mo makes off with all the money from Hana’s dresser: 726,000 yen (roughly equivalent to 5,580 USD at the time). Two summers later, when Hana happens to cross paths with Kimiko again, she resolves, right then and there, to leave her home and live with Kimiko.
Hana and Kimiko find a place in Sangenjaya, an area closer to central Tokyo. Kimiko takes over a “snack bar” (an informal, small-scale hostess bar), where she hires Hana to help out. Eager to contribute, Hana names the bar “Lemon” and does everything she can to get the place up, clean, and ready for its grand opening. One of Lemon’s first customers on opening day is Cotomi, a longtime friend of Kimiko’s and a hostess at a club in the chic Ginza area, who brings along a man with deep pockets to ring in the occasion. The bar gets off to a solid start.
Winter. The city lights glittering in the frosty air. When An Yeonsoo, another old friend of Kimiko’s, gives Hana the cell phone she’d been dying to have, Hana is overjoyed to have a wish of hers come true for once. Hana later takes over the bar’s financials for the Kimiko, who has never been any good with money matters, and floats the idea of hiring some extra help. Her recommendation is a new friend she met downstairs in the building, a girl named Ran. As a former nightclub hostess, Ran can hold her liquor—a great asset for any bar girl. Hana also develops a relationship with Momoko, a girl from a well-off family who makes her way to the bar in an odd turn of events. For Hana, everything just happens to fall into place — she feels like a girl for once, like she’s free to enjoy her life.
The setting is 1998, a time when Japan was in a state of upheaval: the freewheeling, free-spending “bubble economy” had burst, sending the market into disarray; the year 1995 saw a massive earthquake strike the Kansai region and a religious cult perpetrate deadly sarin attacks on the Tokyo subway; and non-regular employment was beginning to run rampant. Gone are the value systems that had buttressed postwar Japan for decades, setting the stage for the doctrine of self-responsibility to wash over society. An unbridgeable rift emerged between the “winners of the world,” who continued to bask in the afterglow of the “Japan-as-number-one” feeling of omnipotence that the eighties ushered in, and the lower classes with no real footing on the economic ladder. Hana, Kimiko, and the other girls in Sisters in Yellow are from that second group. They’ve slipped off the rungs and through the social safety nets, outside the reach of the state’s welfare systems, and onto the fringes, where they live in virtual invisibility.
Kimiko’s mother is in jail. An Yeonsoo, a third-generation Zainichi (Japan-born ethnic Korean) gets by in Shinjuku’s seedy Kabukicho district with the skills she, her brother Woojun, and his friend Jihoon have used to fight past racist discrimination. The girls teeter on the boundary as they try to live right, just one false step away from falling into the dark underbelly of society. Over time, Hana gradually figures out that Kimiko has a mild intellectual disability—the kind of condition that contemporary Japanese society largely ignored. Yeonsoo notes a tattoo on Kimiko’s right hand, which turns out to be a brand that Kimiko’s parents inscribed into their daughter’s skin to get her to tell right from left.
The girls work and work until they finally earn themselves a piece of happiness: a place where they can all live together. Hana does it all on the quiet, making the arrangements for them all to rent a house at bargain rates without ever saying a word about it to Kimiko. The house might be on the old side, but it’s worlds apart from the complexes that they’ve always lived in with the threat of eviction hanging over their heads. Standing outside the house, Hana looks at Kimiko, Ran, and Momoko with pride. “Welcome to our home,” she says, unveiling what becomes a symbol of their happiness.
But for the girls, happiness is a fragile thing. When Hana and Kimiko’s joint savings eventually top two million yen, Hana’s mother comes calling: she has cervical cancer, she has no one she can rely on, and she needs money from her daughter. She thrusts a peace sign in Hana’s face, hoping the gesture will offer some kind of salve and get her request across. Hana, willing to part with 50,000 yen at most, asks if her two fingers up means 20,000 yen. Her mother shakes her head and breaks into tears. “Two doesn’t mean 20,000,” her mom says. “It means two million.” She says she’s gotten herself mired in a pyramid scheme selling shapewear.
Money. Again. Hana makes her money tiptoeing a precarious legal line as a minor drinking at the bar, constantly trying to convince herself that she’s not living her life the wrong way—and now, despite all she’s gone through, it all starts to swirl down the drain of a lingering familial connection. “Hopelessness” doesn’t come close to capturing how Hana feels. On top of it all, Hana loses the foundation she’s built her new life on. When Lemon goes up in flames in a fire caused by the carelessness of the tenant below, Hana throws herself into the dark side of society.
Yeonsoo sets Hana up to meet Viv, who gives Hana a crash course on getting by. Still a minor, Hana chooses to go down the path of a dashiko, handling cash withdrawals for a credit card-skimming operation. She keeps at it, never telling anyone what she does, all to make good on her determination to bring Lemon back. That’s the only thing that keeps her going. Viv has experienced society’s dark side and lived through it; she’s been around the baccarat tables and seen “what’s behind the money.” She’s seen people slowly waste their lives away, little by little, and end up gambling themselves to death. “Money is power,” Viv says, “and poverty is violence.” At Viv’s urging, Hana starts to explore the deeper reaches of criminal activity, where bigger risks bring bigger payoffs.
That begins Hana’s descent into society’s depths. Whoever Hana is, whatever Hana does, she needs money: whether it’s renting the house with the other girls on an honest paycheck, rescuing her mom from swindlers, giving Ran and the others something to hope for in the possibility of a comeback for Lemon, or helping Momoko, disowned by her family, get out of a relationship with a lechy ladies’ man trying to milk her for all he can get. “I’m fine, I’m fine. I can do this,” Hana tells herself. She suggests to Viv that she make official dashiko of Ran, Momoko, and Kimiko, too. Then, running a mission they call “Attack No. 1,” named after the popular volleyball manga, the four of them manage to collect 20,000,000 yen.
Once things start to snowball, they just keep rolling downhill faster and faster. The “Attack” operation starts veering into bolder maneuvers, going as far as skimming customers’ credit cards at a swanky club in Ginza. One of the club’s girls is Cotomi, who’s desperate to get out of her relationship with a jealous, abusive boyfriend by the name of Oikawa. Hana is in complete control of everything, occupying a position of dominance over Kimiko, Ran, and Momoko. There’s no equal standing anymore. When Momoko tries to pull herself out of the “Attack,” Hana confines Momoko to the house both out of her bloated appetite for control and a fervent sense of responsibility for keeping the “home” together at all costs. Hana hears Yeonsoo talking about Cotomi’s ex-boyfriend Jihoon and what he’s been up to since the two broke up, and she then proceeds to divulge the details to Cotomi. With that, Cotomi starts entertaining thoughts of leaving Oikawa, getting back together with Jihoon, and starting over—but when Oikawa finds out about Cotomi’s faint hope for the future with Jihoon, he flies into a rage and kills her. And Hana traces it all back to her own actions.
Hana begins to lose it. She was only trying to help, to protect everybody. She blames herself for Cotomi’s death. Then Viv vanishes, leaving a pile of debt behind. After all that Hana had done to protect her friends, and Kimiko, who couldn’t get by without the help of others, Hana’s hit hard by mounting pressure and an ineffable sense of guilt. Momoko and Ran whisper coldly to Hana, now depleted and unable to think straight: “Nobody knows what happened here, nobody but us. Kimiko and Yeonsoo took advantage of you. Maybe these are fond memories for you, but they took teens got them drunk and had them run scams. We were just kids, unable to push back against adults like them. We didn’t do anything wrong. Let’s split up the money and go our separate ways. Let’s get out of this place.” What was the truth? Who was the user and who was the used? Wasn’t it my choice? But exhausted as she is, all Hana can do is go along with the others. She leaves Kimiko behind, sleeping in the house. Not that Kimiko could explain herself anyway. And with that, their collective life — a beautiful dream supported by the sisterhood they’ve built — comes down with a crash.
Fast-forward twenty years. Kimiko’s been arrested for keeping a young girl captive and beating her up. But did she really do it? Now 40, Hana tracks down the 60-year-old Kimiko—and when the two of them meet again, the actions that Hana takes in the novel’s startling conclusion will leave any reader breathless.
Over the course of the novel, Kawakami maintains an eye for gripping realism and snappy pacing to weave a tragedy against the backdrop of a modern society where self-responsibility and neoliberalism are taking deeper, stronger root. The story teems with the gritty, raw feel of the reality facing the characters, but Kawakami paints every scene in vivid prose with occasional splashes of humor in her signature style. Not only does the novel capture the vibe and cultural climate of late-twentieth-century Japan, but it also opens windows on the light and darkness of an information-driven society the cusp of the internet age and exudes the fleeting, utopian rapture of women joining together with a united purpose. Following Hana and her brave, naïve innocence as she claws her way through life in an increasingly empty world, developing a resilient toughness that eventually gives way to a rapid forgetting of her own past, readers are bound to find themselves unable to either smile at or look down her. With incredible realism, Kawakami simultaneously skewers long-ignored, persistent dimensions of Japanese society’s dark side and the universal human need to survive in the circumstances they inhabit.
Who are the real villains? Behind the appearance of free will, what is it that compels us to make the choices we make? How do we live? What does it mean to be a parent? What does it mean to be a child? What is a family? What is a home? What defines the connections between victims, victimizers, and memory? Balancing a stunning narrative weight with effortless readability, Sisters in Yellow grips the reader and brings these fundamental questions about human existence into sharp focus.