Struggle, Sentiments, and Sisterhood: Mieko Kawakami's SISTERS IN YELLOW as a Trial of Female Friendship
Set against the glittering backdrop of 1990s Tokyo, Sisters in Yellow is a haunting and atmospheric journey of survival, capturing the fragile warmth of a teenage girl’s newfound sanctuary, along with four women, before it is slowly dismantled by the quiet cruelties of betrayal and inequality.
Monica Gogoi, a reader from our community, shares her thoughts on this remarkable book.
I finished Breasts and Eggs in 2024 and didn't fully leave it for weeks afterward. Mieko Kawakami wrote a book that screamed 'womanhood.'
Seven years later, Kawakami has done it again.
This is a novel built almost entirely on sentiment and character. Kawakami constructs the book around two recurring engines — the color 'yellow' and the constant 'pressure of money' — and uses them to trace one young woman's slow passage from dependence toward a fragile, hard-won sense of self. The story feels, rather, like a sustained, intimate study into the same world of female friendship that Kawakami first opened up in Breasts and Eggs.
Kawakami is widely regarded as one of the defining voices in a male-dominated Japanese literary landscape, and the reasons are even clearer to me now. There is a patience in how she builds her female protagonists. She deliberately weaves the plot, not around massive incidents, but rather, if one takes a closer look, one will understand that she builds it from small, unremarkable moments until they reveal something truer and deeper. I think this is what gives her characters, even 'the youngest and the poorest among them,' a psychological weight that is perhaps easy to underestimate at first glance.
A Bar Called Lemon
Hana is fifteen, living with her mother in a cramped apartment in the suburbs of Tokyo, with no money and no real security. Kimiko, an old friend of her mother's, appears at their door one day, and the two open a small bar together called Lemon. For Hana, the bar becomes something close to a haven: the source of money, of freedom, of a security she has not known before. Ran and Momoko join soon after, and the four women start running Lemon together until an unfortunate event brings to them an unanticipated tragedy, putting everything Hana has built her hope around to the test.
The premise is slim by design, and Kawakami probably knows it. So, there were times when I felt she was not necessarily working toward plot resolution. Her real subject is what four women, who are bound by circumstance and not by blood, do to and for each other across the accumulation of these ordinary days, and what remains of that bond — once the place that housed it has fallen into uncertainty.
‘How did people go on living? People I passed on the street, people reading newspapers in the cafés or drinking booze in the izakaya, eating ramen, going out with friends to make memories, people coming from somewhere, going elsewhere, laughing, raging, crying, people who live for today and would wake up and do the same tomorrow. How did they do it?’
— Mieko Kawakami, Sisters in Yellow
The Color of Belief
'Yellow,' established early in the novel and carried through with deliberate intention, stands true to the title's promise throughout. Hana is told once that the color brings prosperity and money, and from that point, she almost becomes obsessed with it, assembling a small corner of her world devoted entirely to it. Yellow becomes an 'object,' a 'recurring image,' and a 'private talisman' — all at once: something Hana holds onto whenever her life feels a little less stable.
I found something subtly philosophical in this detail. Hana's yellow corner, which she created, was not really about luck. It was possibly more about control in life, especially in those moments where she had almost none. It is as if long before she held any real power over her circumstances, she found a way to act as though she did, 'collecting yellow things' as if almost making a small bargain with fate. So, Kawakami seemed less interested in the actual truth of this belief and more interested in what it does for a person to believe in something, anything, most importantly when survival itself becomes uncertain.
Money, running alongside yellow as the novel's other constant pressure, only sharpened that belief further. For Hana, money was never 'abstract prosperity.' It was rent. It was safety. It was the difference between dependence and her sense of self.
Innocence, Ambition, and the Cost of Choosing Yourself
Kawakami's real strength in this book lies in how she renders the small, candid thoughts of a young woman discovering her own ambitions and dreams. In a moment in the story, Hana, our young protagonist, gets thrilled at the prospect of working. Hana reflects that the more she works, the more she will earn, and that she is going to be good at this job. This expression of emotion on the surface seems small, almost throw-away, but a deeper understanding would tell us that it carries the full weight of someone tasting independence for the first time.
Further, a childhood memory intensifies that innocence. Watching Kiki's Delivery Service with her mother, Hana recalls that while her mother and her mother's friends watched the film, wishing they could fly, she felt no pull toward flight at all. She wanted to leave home and work as much as she liked, the way Kiki did. This generational split felt genuinely revealing. Her mother's generation imagines freedom as escape, as lightness, as flight. Hana imagines freedom as labor, as the right to be useful, to be paid, to be needed. Here, Kawakami does not editorialize on which vision holds more truth. She lets the contrast stand, and allows the distance between a mother's idea of liberation and a daughter's, to speak for itself.
A smaller scene carries the same precision. On being gifted a phone, Hana is moved not by the object. She is moved by the fact that someone went out of their way for her, that someone was watching out for her and telling her 'she did not have to worry.' This reaction is to safety, and to being seen. Kawakami has this gift for locating the real emotional center of a moment and writing directly into it.
Later, as Hana's circumstances grow more complicated, the novel turns toward a harder question, one that is also explicitly asked in one of the chapters, but could also sum up the entire story: what does it mean to ask for forgiveness, to be forgiven, to forgive somebody at all? The question runs beneath the rest of the book. As we will see, Hana's arc is one of female rage built under unfavorable circumstances, and of the choices a person has to make between protecting others and finally choosing herself.
However, Kawakami ultimately offers no easy resolution to where the line between 'selfishness' and 'selflessness' actually sits, and that refusal to resolve it, actually felt like the most honest decision in the book to me.
Sisters in Yellow
by Mieko Kawakami
'With Sisters in Yellow, [Kawakami] proves she is still the most exciting Japanese novelist at work today' The Times
A heart-stopping story of teenage girls on the brink in 1990s Tokyo from the International Booker Prize-Shortlisted author of HEAVEN and BREASTS AND EGGS.
“I can never forget the sense of pure astonishment I felt when I first read Mieko Kawakami”
— Haruki Murakami
“A story both absurd and horrifying”
— The Guardian
A Character Study, Not a Plot Machine
Friendship in Sisters in Yellow layers itself over age, personality, and class, fusing into a whole through shared struggle and survival. This pattern also seems to echo the generational portrait of female bonds Kawakami built with Natsuko, Makiko, and Midoriko in Breasts and Eggs, though here the canvas is narrower and the stakes more immediate and urgent. Where the earlier novel spanned questions of motherhood and reproduction across women of different generations, this one narrows its concerns into a few short years of one girl's passage from her teens into adulthood, sharpening its focus on survival in the present moment.
The novel is built primarily on sentiment and character, and as a reader, one should approach it on those terms. Those drawn to character-driven fiction will find a deeply nuanced study here. Readers who need pace and twists and turns may find the writing slow at points, though Kawakami does sustain a low pressure of suspense throughout, enough to keep the pages turning even when little is happening on the surface. The novel also lingers a little too long in its nostalgic register, past the point where a scene is still revealing something new, so maybe tighter editing in places would have served the material well.
Even with that caveat, Sisters in Yellow succeeds at what it sets out to do. It offers a precise, unsentimental account of how belief, money, and friendship hold a person together when little else will. Reading it, I was reminded again why Kawakami remains one of the most exacting chroniclers of female interiority writing today.
