There are two kinds of people in Mieko Kawakami’s Sisters in Yellow: those born into money and those who are not. Everything else is a consequence. Set in Japan in the late 1990s, the novel, translated from the Japanese by Lauren Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio, reads almost like literary horror, exposing the lives of those society has abandoned. The horror here lies in the terrifying normalcy of deprivation. Those born into wealth inherit a world designed for their survival while those born without it inherit debt, precarity, and a lifetime of impossible choices. One by one, every legitimate door closes, work fails, family fails, the state fails.
What remains open are the gates of the underworld, patiently waiting to absorb those with nowhere else to go. Kawakami writes, “People with money make the rules to help themselves, and poor people get sucked dry. And when you’re all dried up, when you’re nothing but dregs, they make you think it was your fault you failed at like. They make it sound like you had a chance. Well, f### that.” Kawakami unfolds this brutal world through the eyes of 15-year-old Hana, who lives with a mother absent in every way that matters. What follows is a painfully desperate yet innocent search for something heartbreakingly ordinary: a normal home and family, a life untouched by the constant arithmetic of survival. Hana reflects, “When I got to middle school, I started to notice things by my friends’ faces, by their attitudes. I could tell right away which kids were from normal homes and which ones weren’t.” Along the way, Hana finds fragments of belonging in other girls her age, Momoko and Ran, and in adults like Kimiko, Kotomi, and Yeongsu, who are themselves trying to stay afloat in a world that has long stopped making promises to people like them. Along with Kimiko, Hana opens Lemon, a shabby, gritty neighborhood bar in the alleys of Sangenjaya, Tokyo.
Kawakami dismantles the sentimental idea that home is built on love alone. Here, belonging has a brutal material life, demanding a bank account, a stable job
Yet every attempt to build a home only pushes Hana further away from childhood. Through Hana, Kawakami poses a devastating question: who gets to remain a child? For some, childhood is a protected space where mistakes can be made, dreams indulged and dependence taken for granted. For others, it is a luxury they are never allowed to inherit.
And if childhood is unequally distributed, so is belonging. Kawakami quietly dismantles the sentimental idea that home is built on love alone. Here, belonging has a brutal material life, demanding an address, an identity card, a bank account, a stable job; in short, a place from which one can exist in the eyes of the state and society. Deprived of these, Hana and those around her are condemned to inhabit a world of perpetual impermanence, where even the most intimate relationships are shaped by economic insecurity. Friendship strives to become shelter in vain; motherhood cannot be disentangled from precarity; schooling is interrupted by survival; and, in the end, love acquires a price. Kawakami understands that poverty does not merely take away money; it slowly erodes the material conditions that make attachment, intimacy, and belonging possible, forcing every relationship to bear the weight of deprivation.
Sisters in Yellow occasionally overstays its welcome and could have benefited from a tighter edit. That said, Kawakami’s recurring motifs—Hana repeatedly losing money, her mother falling prey to exploitation, Kimiko’s almost ritualistic absent-mindedness—are among the novel’s most effective literary devices. They capture the cruel circularity of poverty, where deprivation is never a singular event but an endless loop. Lives do not move forward so much as they circle the same crises in different forms. In Kawakami’s world, poverty is not only inherited but relentlessly reproduced, just like in the real world.