Sisters in Yellow - Kawakami Mieko

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Sisters in Yellow

by
Kawakami Mieko

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Title:	Sisters in Yellow
Author:	Kawakami Mieko
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2023 (Eng. 2026)
Length:	430 pages
Original in:	Japanese
Availability:	Sisters in Yellow - US
	Sisters in Yellow - UK
	Sisters in Yellow - Canada
	Les filles du Citron - France
	Das gelbe Haus - Deutschland
	Das gelbe Haus - Italia

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

Japanese title: 黄色い家
Translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio

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Our Assessment:

B : solid read, but frustrating in a number of ways

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Boston Globe	.	11/3/2026	Cory Oldweiler
The Japan Times	.	17/3/2026	Thu-Huong Ha
Neue Zürcher Zeitung	.	15/9/2025	Judith Leister
The NY Times Book Rev.	.	16/3/2026	Dwight Garner
The Times	.	18/3/2026	Laura Hackett
Die Welt	.	12/8/2025	Peter Praschl

From the Reviews:

"Roughly the first half of Sisters in Yellow epitomizes what makes Kawakami’s writing so great, melding incisive social commentary with a cast of memorable, scrappy, put-upon young people. But an abrupt tonal shift late in the novel, something seemingly endemic to all Kawakami’s work, results in the protagonist evincing a rather dizzying change in temperament and the narrative meandering its way through fits and starts toward a disappointingly rote dénouement. (...) Given the novel’s many lengthy narrative tangents, I wish more time had been devoted to exploring how Hana so quickly goes from naif balking at the very concept of using an ATM to abusive paranoiac demanding more and more risk. Overall, though, I will take a novel like this any day over a meticulously planned, overly predictable thriller." - Cory Oldweiler, Boston Globe

"Sisters in Yellow is a high-energy, pulpy new novel (.....) The author’s winding, clause-filled sentences, sometimes difficult to parse in their original, are florid in Japanese but fluid in English, translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio. (...) Sisters in Yellow is essentially a story about children who are surrounded by inept adults, who do not feel safe in a world in which no one is really in charge. (...) Though it’s tempting to read the novel for its commentary on post-bubble, pre-Y2K Japanese society, to me it has more in common with movies like “Uncut Gems” or “Goodfellas,” movies lubricated by something between desperation and greed." - Thu-Huong Ha, The Japan Times

"(I)n diesem Buch ist alles prekär: das Selbstbewusstsein der Frauen, der Zusammenhalt der Gesellschaft, die ganze Existenz. Von den weiblichen Charakteren weiss keine, auch Hana nicht, wohin mit sich. Männer sind nur schemenhaft präsent, als Väter, Boyfriends oder Sugar-Daddys. (...) All dies erzählt Kawakami im Plauderton eines Gesellschaftsromans. Ihre Charaktere entwickelt sie durch die leicht unscharfe Brille von Hanas Wahrnehmung, hauptsächlich mittels beiläufiger Dialoge. (...) Vieles bleibt in Das gelbe Haus bis zum Schluss im Unklaren, wird meisterhaft in der Schwebe gelassen." - Judith Leister, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

"(G)ritty, noirish, almost Richard Price-like (.....) Kawakami’s novels are not unlike Theodore Dreiser’s in their realism, and at 429 pages, Sisters in Yellow is Dreiserian in its sprawl. The book displays a gift for confident, if rambling, storytelling, and the details pile up convincingly. Yet the novel refused to come alive in my hands. I never felt lucky to be reading it -- the ultimate test of a novel, I suppose. Kawakami’s work, at least in translation, does not have much to offer on a sentence level. Texture, depth and grainy intellection are absent. The sentences swim and skim like surface bugs. (...) This novel drowns in thesis statements, but more than a few hit home" - Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

"Sisters in Yellow is a fascinating girl’s-eye view of what it means to grow up in Japan without wealth, and the moral (and physical) sacrifices you must make to attain it. (...) This is not the Japan you find in novels about cats, cafés and bookshops. Kawakami draws back this cosy façade to reveal the grimy reality underneath -- and she does it with consummate style. With Sisters in Yellow, she proves she is still the most exciting Japanese novelist at work today. " - Laura Hackett, The Times

"Immer wieder merkt man dem Buch an, dass es ursprünglich als Fortsetzungsroman in der Tageszeitung Yomiuri Shimbun erschien. Es hat einen episodischen Atem, Cliffhanger, Kapitel, die eher wie Nebel sind, andere wie Messer. Und während man dem Abdriften von Kawakamis Heldinnen folgt, erfährt man unendlich viel über ein Japan, von dem man nicht so viel hört. (...) Vielleicht liegt es an dieser Glaubwürdigkeit, dass Kawakami vor allem jungen Leserinnen so viel bedeutet. (...) Das gelbe Haus ist kein Buch, das alles auflöst, kein Thriller mit sauberem Ende. Eher eine Sammlung von Brüchen, Versuchen, zarten Momenten, ein Roman über das Bilden von Schwesternschaften und Ersatzfamilien und deren Auseinanderbrechen, weil das Leben sich leider nicht zwingen lässt. Vielmehr hat Das gelbe Haus etwas, an dem man sich festhalten kann: Hoffnung, dass Menschen sich so etwas wie ein Zuhause bauen können, wenn sie sich zusammentun." - Peter Praschl, Die Welt

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

Sisters in Yellow is narrated by forty-year-old Hana Ito, opening with her coming across a name familiar to her -- that of Kimiko Yoshikawa -- in an article online in 2020, leading her to recounting experiences from some twenty years earlier, beginning with when she was just a teenager and first encountered Kimiko. Sixty-year-old Kimiko has now been arrested, for confining a woman in her twenties in her apartment for over a year, and Hana is worried that she might be drawn into the police investigation because of her relationship with Kimiko decades earlier. She mentions having: "changed my phone number and cut my old ties in the hopes that no one would find me" and that she lived with Kimiko and a Ran Kato and Momoko Tamamori for a while -- and that she doesn't know what has become of the latter two. She feels very guilty about something, and sums up ominously:

The three of us had been young, and we'd been acting under Kimiko's orders. But then what about Kotomi ? Whose fault was it that she was dead ?

       Hana contacts Ran, who hears her out but wants nothing to do with any of this -- and warns Hana against going to the police ("Do not, under any circumstances, go to the police, okay ?""), arguing: "We were young and stupid, let's keep our skeletons in the closet". Ran has clearly moved on and wants nothing more to do with whatever happened in the past (or with Hana, whom she hadn't heard from since they parted ways back then).
       Apparently bad things happened, back in the day -- but it takes quite a while until Hana spills exactly what did happen (and how Kotomi wound up dead). The bulk of the novel, leading also up to that, is taken up by her account of long-ago events, starting in the mid-1990s, when, at fifteen, she first met Kimiko -- waking up one day next to this woman wearing her mom's pajamas. Her easygoing mom sometimes brought home friends and girls from the bar she worked at to stay the night, so Hana isn't too surprised; as it turns out, mom is going to mostly be away for a while, and Kimiko moves in for the next month -- though she then disappears from Hana's life pretty much as abruptly as she entered it, for quite a while.
       Mom has always been real casual with money -- like pretty much everything else -- but, in the time that follows, Hana is determined:

I wanted to leave home as soon as I graduated from high school, so I spent all my time working to save up money. If I wasn't at school or at the bathhouse or sleeping, I spent every second I had working at a family restaurant by the station.

She saves up quite a bit over the year and half she's working but it's all for naught (thanks also, in no small part, to mom) -- but then Hana, now seventeen, does run into Kimiko again. Kimiko is about to embark on a new venture -- opening a bar of her own --, and Hana joins in, helping her as well as moving in with her. (Easygoing mom always goes with the flow, so she seems fine with all that; they don't discuss it or anything, Hana just goes ahead and moves and mom doesn't seem to react to that at all.)
It's Hana who comes up with the name of the place, too -- 'Lemon', explaining:

Yellow's our lucky color. Have you ever heard of feng shui ? The way it works is, if you put yellow things in the west, like knickknacks and decorations and stuff, you get this boost of good luck with all your finances. Plus, Kimiko has the kanji for yellow in her name, and lemons are yellow, too, right ? It's a super powerful color.

Hana even sets up a 'Yellow Corner' in the bar (and, later, at home) -- "a collection of yellow knickknacks on a shelf I'd set up against the wall on the west side of the room", and, as she reflects later:

Yellow was how this all started. I met Kimiko, who had yellow in her name, and she was the first one who'd taught me about yellow bringing fortune, and that was how I was able to leave Higashimurayama and find my own place, my own life.

But initially -- for years -- she shares place and life with Kimiko, and then also Ran and Momoko. The bar is small, but business is decent enough and they do reasonably well. Ran hasn't fared well at other places, but easily slips into a role at Lemon. Momoko is a high school student from a wealthy family -- unpopular, unattractive, and not a great student, attending a not-great but expensive school, and with a bombshell of a younger sister, Shizuka (who, however, has very poor hygiene habits), -- and falls in with Hana and Ran.
Money is aways an issue, as even when business is decent enough things are precarious with Lemon. And, as before, Hana is always obsessed with money -- with accumulating it. As before -- and also later -- Hana keeps stuffing it in a box kept at home. Even she recognizes that that is not ideal: "part of me thought it might be safer to put our money in the bank", but they are ... defeated by the logistics of that:

I'd never had a bank account, and I didn't have an ID either. Kimiko said she'd forgotten the PIN to her bank account, and she'd lost her family seal, too. So the bank wasn't an option.

       Soon enough, when there is quite a big pile, mom again comes into the picture, and again manages to be responsible for basically wiping out Hana's savings. Undeterred -- or even more determined, when the whole Lemon-business then also goes up in flames -- Hana keeps saving, earning even more -- first alone, then with Ran and Momoko joining in, at a surprisingly easy to pull off form of criminal fraud. There is a bit of danger, and there's always the concern that the plug might get pulled, one way or another, by those organizing the fraud, but on the whole the girls do exceptionally well. The kitty grows to very decent proportions -- over twenty million yen .....
       From when she was working at the restaurant for minimum wage, Hana has always seemed to be more interested in accumulating money than spending it. At that time she had a specific purpose -- to get away from home -- but even then without the money she gets away from home, and starts a new life happily enough working with Kimiko at Lemon. When the Lemon-dream bursts then, for a while, the purpose of accumulating funds is to relaunch that dream -- but she comes to realize that that is unrealistic, again largely for logistical reasons. But Hana continues to save and hoard. She doesn't spend anything on luxuries and they all pretty much count their pennies the entire time (with Momoko having family-funds to fall back on anyway, at least for much of the time).
       Typically -- before she enlists Ran and Momoko to join in pulling off the frauds -- Hana describes how:

From my monthly earnings, I took only enough for rent, utilities, and food and saved the rest of what I made in the navy box in the attic. In that murky space, the money waited. When no one was around, I'd hold it softly in both hands, feeling it, its weight, and when I was holding it, it waited within me, invisible as numbers. No matter how often I looked at it, my money never moved. Its stillness calmed me. The thought of it unshrinking, unmoving, here, secret from everybody, working silently towards my goal, made something within me loosen.

At that point she still has the goal -- of reviving the Lemon-dream -- but even when she realizes that that won't be possible she still continues hoarding and accumulating -- even as they are then raking in quite considerable amounts of money. But, as she notes: "Having money, earning money, spending money ... they might seem similar, but they are very different things". She doesn't seem to have any qualms about how she is *earning* the money (illegally, and with others bearing the cost) -- but also, instead of indulging in comforts and luxuries she could buy herself and enjoy, she focuses almost entirely on the sheer accumulation of it, seeing that as a validation of sorts (with her also telling herself that it will allow for a future -- even as she doesn't have any real conception of what that might involve, and doesn't really seem to have any idea what she might then spend the money on; she seems to imagine that money will offer some security -- but it never buys the security (or anything else) that she really is after).
Hana tells herself:

Money gives you time. Time to think. Time to sleep. Time to get sick. Time to wait.

Eventually, she also acknowledges:

What did I hope to find in money ? Well ... for me, it wasn't the money itself. It as ... a house, a home.

She has that, in a sense, when she plays house with Kimiko, Ran, and Momoko, creating a family of sorts around her. It is an idyll, to her:

Around the square kotatsu we settled, one to a side, our legs under the blanket, toasted by the heater. We fit so neatly that I felt like we hadn't chosen to be here of our own free will, but that each of us was part of something larger -- a single creature, the four of us and this house, each with our own parts to play.

       It's a fantasy world of sorts -- but it's understandable that Hana is drawn towards this sense of family that she has never really experienced with her own: her father was never much of a presence and eventually simply drifted out of her and her mother's life, and mom also drifts along, with neither Hana nor her mother making much of an effort to maintain any sort of connection; they often don't seem to know what the other is doing for very extended periods of time.
       While Kimiko is good at keeping things tidy and neat she is fragile in other regards ("She's a little off", as one acquaintance reminds Hana; "She's normal enough, at least on the surface, but I don't know -- there are moments, right ? When you don't know if she understands what you're telling her"), and it is Hana who basically runs the household, and mostly -- and increasingly, as time goes by -- calls the shots.
       The frauds that the young women are involved in grow more dangerous -- with the final one appropriately an operation they call 'C'est la Vie'. Things don't crashing down on them, but do fall apart -- and, despite their great savings, Hana worries about their future once they are without a steady source of income; in her desperation she also becomes more controlling. Her little family does not take to that too well; between that and then the death of Kotomi things really do come crashing down -- albeit all from within.
       And, as Momoko points out:

"We can make it like none of it ever happened," Momoko said. "Because nobody knows. The second we're out, that's the end of it."

Of course, Hana doesn't want this to end; she wants to hold household and her substitute-family together. But that proves impossible, not least because Momoko and Ran aren't nearly as on board with this whole adventure as Hana is. The years aren't exactly wiped out, but it really is just an episode in their lives; Hana then even just returns to the place she'd been living with her mother before, with mom registering her return but little more:

And then we went back to how we'd always been. The only thing that had changed was that I was no longer a teenager, and my mother's hostess friends didn't come by anymore.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the novel then comes with Hana's overview of her life in the two decades since then and what became (and didn't become) of her. (From the novel's first pages we already know that Ran seems to have done fine and that Kimiko got in trouble with the law; unfortunately, we never learn what happened to Momoko beyond Ran's mention that: "Momoko went missing, though I don't know all the details. I just heard the rumors").
At one lowpoint during those years she lived with Kimiko, Hana wonders:

How did people go on living ? [...] How did they do it ? I knew they had honest jobs, earned honest money. But what I didn't understand was how they'd first obtained the qualifications to live with that honesty. How had they made it to that side ? I wanted someone to tell me.

       Early on, she did have honest jobs, but, as she frequently notes, there's something not-quite-right with many of her living and working arrangements, from the leases for Lemon and the house they move into to the cellphone someone arranges for her. She shouldn't be working at Lemon at first either, when she is still underage, and she lacks basic ID and thus, for example, they never get something as simple and straightforward as a bank account (even as Japan has an extremely low rate of adults who are unbanked -- it's almost unheard of). Later, of course, she and her friends are involved in outright criminal activity, and have fake identification (though they never seem to need it) -- and, as Kimiko, makes clear one time that Hana thinks they maybe should turn to the police: "There are no cops. Not for us". The authorities are to be avoided -- and, indeed, Hana in many ways lives outside the system (including also never bothering to finish school); inexplicably, however, she never makes much effort to at least take advantage of some of the simple things in the various systems -- from proper ID to a written lease to a bank account -- that would make her life so much easier (and might, for example, allow her to realize her dream, of re-opening Lemon; instead she just gives up on the whole idea -- without finding an adequate substitute-dream/goal).
       Some of the drama the initial set-up seems to promise -- the death of Kotomi ! Kimiko in trouble with the law for confining a young woman in her apartment and beating her for over a year ! (suggesting that Hana and her friends were similar victims ...) -- doesn't pan out as one might have expected. Kimiko and her role in the story and in Hana's life, in particular, are somewhat confusing: two decades on, Hana speaks of having acted: "under Kimiko's orders", but she (and then also the others) don't really seem to have been forced into anything by her. Hana looks up to the older, experienced woman, especially while Lemon is up and running, but Kimiko doesn't really take any advantage of the sway she has over Hana; mostly, things just seem to fall into place. If anyone is controlling it is Hana -- especially as things fall apart and she flails in trying to hold onto her dream. (Sisters in Yellow was first published serially in a newspaper, and one has to wonder whether Kawakami changed the character of Kimiko and the role she is meant to play over the course of writing the novel.)
       At one point, Hana says: "it's more important to believe, to let your belief sustain you, because then you can tell yourself that everything's going to be okay" -- and it's a notion she doesn't seem to be able to let go of. Hana is ultimately a somewhat frustrating protagonist because it seems like a few simple steps -- like getting proper ID (and a goddamn bank account ...) -- would see her quickly find much surer footing; kudos, however, to Kawakami for seeing Hana's misguided approach through to the end, in what she makes of Hana up to the time she tells her story, some two decades after those formative years and events. Hana's (actual) family situation, from childhood on, make Hana's attitude somewhat plausible -- as also reflected in Hana and her mother's relationship after Hana returns to the fold -- but it's still ... wild.
       Much of Sisters in Yellow is quite compelling reading; as misguided and at sea as she is, Hana is very determined, giving her narration considerable drive. The characters she interacts with -- often generous and helpful, along with some who are also, in their own ways, lost or damaged -- are interesting, though there's far too little character-development to most of them; mostly, they're just there -- or then not there, as one of the recurring themes of the novel is people just dropping out of sight and contact (though also often, and just as suddenly, reäppearing; people are constantly suddenly gone or unreachable (though in the case of those pursuing crooked things -- quite a number, here -- they have often good reason to)). Significant too, is the simple lack of communication between characters, and not just because they fall out of touch or reach: even when they're together, the characters rarely really talk to one another. Even when they live together, many of the characters practically move through the day as if no one else was there. Hana mentions this lack of meaningful (or pretty much any other) communication frequently, but she neither does her part -- she doesn't try very hard to engage the others in conversation -- nor does she seem to mind much; the physical presence of others seems sufficient to her.
       Kawakami does milk Hana's (deep-seated, entirely justified, and lingering) sense of abandonment nicely for the rather poignant conclusion.
       Still, while a solid read, bit by bit -- including offering interesting insights into the lives of those at a periphery of Japanese society (Hana also hails from Higashimurayama, at the distant edges of Greater Tokyo, and the novel's conclusion sees her pulled back there one more time) -- this is a novel that doesn't quite all come together; I can't help but suspect that parts of the original concept underwent some changes in the serial writing, leaving a few too many bits unsatisfyingly un- and answered.

- M.A.Orthofer, 15 March 2026

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Links:

Sisters in Yellow:

Alfred A. Knopf publicity page
Picador publicity page
中央公論新社 publicity page
Creative Artists Agency information page
Gallimard publicity page
DuMont publicity page
Edizioni E/O publicity page
Q & A

Reviews:

Kawakami Mieko:

Official site

Other books by Kawakami Mieko under review:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Japanese literature

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About the Author:

Japanese author Kawakami Mieko (川上未映子) was born in 1976.

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