BookBrowse Reviews Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami

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The adventures of Hana Ito and her friends as they try to pull themselves out of poverty by working at a bar named Lemon.

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Two eras of social importance are prominently featured in Sisters in Yellow. The early days of the coronavirus pandemic, and the late '90s. The novel's Tokyo makes for a lush setting in which to explore gender solidarity, financial scarcity, and isolation. When the book opens, the pandemic has isolated Hana Ito, a part-time salesclerk. As was routine in those fraught days, Hana is absently scanning the web, when she lands upon a nightmare. A story about a vulnerable young woman, held hostage for months, trapped in a small room in a small apartment. Her captor, an older woman named Kimiko Yoshikawa, repeatedly tortured her with beatings and was apprehended after the young woman's escape. The name of the accused feels salty on Hana's tongue, she can taste the rancidness. Kimiko Yoshikawa. Kimiko Yoshikawa.

Hana rereads the article three times. "I tried to exhale the huge lump that had formed deep in my chest. My fingers were trembling. It was her. Kimiko. It had to be her."

Despite the coronavirus lockdown's intent to keep infections at bay, Hana is unwell. She isn't physically ill, but a lack of emotional safety triggers tumult and destabilization, and she falls into an abyss, facing her past and a woman she knew when she was fifteen years old. She begins to panic because of secrets she has never told, and because of what she has done that cannot be undone.

Backward-facing, the story then considers Hana's fifteenth summer. Hana's mother Ai, who was chasing her loser boyfriend around town, arranged for Kimiko Yoshikawa to take her place. Hana was taken aback at this stranger wearing her mother's pajamas but soon learned the difference between the two women. Kimiko was older than Ai, but was younger-presenting, the type you could talk to about sex and boyfriends and not get a lecture. Kimiko repeatedly washed the walls and cooked with joy. Her folding of clothes into neat quarters was an art form. With Kimiko, there was always food in the house, a person to talk to, companionship. And then the summer ended. Kimiko stocked the refrigerator and disappeared.

Sisters in Yellow was written after the #MeToo movement gripped the world. Mieko Kawakami, celebrated in Japan, was fascinated with gender solidarity and survivorship. "I wanted to highlight solidarity's underlying problems with the same intensity that I believed in its goodness." Theoretically, solidarity is complex. It depends on inclusion but also nurtures exclusion. The inherent conflict is personal freedom at the cost of group obligation. And, as has been noted in feminist literature for five decades, sisters will find a way to trash sisters.

I experienced the novel as Icarus flying too close to the sun. Perhaps because of its sensitive strength: the circumstances of women in financial distress. It's not that far removed from Andre Dubus III's novel The House of Sand and Fog, a sensitive fable of what it is like to lose everything.

Hana's perseverance creates an emotional investment with readers. There she was after Ai returned and Kimiko disappeared, a striver who quit school, waitressed and saved every penny she made. But one day Ai's heartless boyfriend Snoozy found her stash and pocketed all of it, then disappeared. Hana felt an acute absence of power and was despondent until she saw Kimiko again, entirely by accident.

Kimiko was soon to open a bar that did not yet have a name and Hana suggested Lemon. She worshiped Feng Shui, where the color yellow is a striking collaboration of energy, warmth, and hope. Kimiko thought it perfect. Soon after Hana started working at the bar, tirelessly doing everything that needed to be done, pouring drinks, chatting with customers, monitoring karaoke, counting the money, Hana moved in with Kimiko and her mother barely noticed.

Lemon was a small bar that attracted wealthy older men looking for feminine distractions to sublimate the stress in their lives. As the bar's Mama, Kimiko had familiar baggage. Her mother had been a criminal arsonist, drug user, shoplifter, in and out of jail—in jail when Lemon was opened. Women with abnormal childhoods, violent parents, and dysfunctional upbringings endure a tremendous cost. A gangster named Yeongsu details, in one of the more heartbreaking passages, how certain women are treated as objects: "People like Kimiko, you can make them do anything, do anything to them. No family, no connections to the normal world, no real ID. If they disappear all of a sudden, nobody cares."

Transiency is a strong sub-theme that adds depth, the idea that nothing is permanent in an impoverished world. Those who live on the margins are routinely sucker-punched by the unexpected. Something is always going wrong while life is forging ahead at a rapid pace.

When Lemon burns down because of a fire in the restaurant next door, Hana is circled back to a familiar orbit, the absurdity of being poor and having nothing. Without an income, nor an education, and with an apathetic household depending on her, the pressure to save everyone is exhausting. This is after Hana met Ran Kato, months earlier, on the street handing out fliers advertising a business; it was the gentlemen's club where she worked. Neither Ran nor Hana had a friend. Hana sensed Ran was unhappy with her work and hired her to work at Lemon. A third friend, Momoko Tamamori, also worked at Lemon. She was a daughter of affluence in a dysfunctional family, the ugly duckling who was fed up and ran away. The three girls and Kimiko were roommates, but after the fire the money dwindled and Hana kept thinking of when Snoozy ripped her off.

Decades later, when Hana is transfixed by the web article about Kimiko, she calls Ran, having dug through old boxes to retrieve her phone number, and they meet in a café. The years have added gravity to Ran. She glows less as she remembers, "Back when we were living together—I mean, I guess we did some pretty sketchy things. But we were what, twenty?"

I was hoping for a different Hana, one who slays her poverty, even though I know that in real life poor women in desperate circumstances remain poor women in their desperate circumstances. I credit the novel's translators (Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio) for mining emotional impact while keeping the story a Japanese one, with villains both male and female, sentimental figures representing multiple generations.

There isn't much symmetry between Sisters in Yellow and the identity-based #MeToo movement other than the complex vagaries of sisterhood where solidarity is imperfect. Too often, solidarity is a whirlwind romance before the ugly divorce. No one wants to bend and break, until everyone bends, breaks, and fights with one another. And yet what is so powerful about sisterhood, even with dissent on the horizon, is what Hana and her friends built, celebrated, and loved. There is a story about a woman on a train realizing she left one glove on the platform, and so she drops the other glove out the window so someone will have a pair. That is the solidarity of Sisters in Yellow before it is dismantled. The we. Not the me.

This review first ran in the April 22, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.