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.
