Common People
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Sisters in Yellow, Mieko Kawakami, trans. Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio, Picador, 2026, 448 pages, £16.99.
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If, behind John Rawls’s ‘veil of ignorance’, you had no sense of the conditions you might enter into, would you still choose to be born? And if that life is shaped by poverty, isolation and persistent bad luck, what does it mean to go on living? These are the questions that concern Mieko Kawakami in Sisters in Yellow. Departing from the meditations on gender for which she is most well known, Kawakami uses wealth and class to depict the lives of good people born into bad circumstances. Sisters in Yellow is a catalogue of misfortune – the poorer characters are murdered, subjected to racism, addicted to drugs and gambling; all mothers are selfish and most men are abusive. Around its characters gathers an economy of desperation – multi-level marketing schemes, insurance fraud, enjo kōsai (‘compensated dating’, like sugar dating) and more.
This is Kawakami’s first foray into roman noir. As is typical of the genre, the novel opens with the report of a crime, replete with sordid detail. It is the apogee of the COVID era, and middle-aged deli worker Hana is scrolling the internet when she reads about a sixty-year-old woman who kidnapped, blackmailed and beat up a young woman over the course of a year. She recognises the accused’s name – Kimiko Yoshikawa, someone Hana spent her formative years living with, and revering.
Born to an absent father and a financially irresponsible, scatter-brained hostess mother, Hana grew up without reliable adults, and her peers avoided her because poverty, of course, is catching. Enter Kimiko, a friend of her mother’s, who nourished a teenaged Hana with food and attention for one summer while Hana’s mother was away. A few years later, when a still-underaged Hana is reunited with Kimiko, she drops out of school to open a bar with her. Their coterie grows as Hana collects Ran, an entertainer at a nearby club, and Momoko, a broody runaway from a wealthy household. For a time, the found family cohabit and enjoy the bar’s modest success, until it burns down. In order to finance the bar’s reopening, Hana uses fake cards to withdraw money from real accounts belonging to wealthy strangers.
Hana’s relationship with money is fraught – no matter how much she earns, she is always destined to lose it. Her relationship with Kimiko is yet more fraught. Having grown up feeling neglected and vulnerable, Hana tries to fashion some security by saving up and surrounding herself with those she sees as allies. Hana is particularly attached to Kimiko, seeing her as her ‘saviour’. But it soon becomes apparent that Kimiko is devoid of requisite skills, like financial responsibility or the ability to plan anything. How she manages to survive is unclear. It falls to the industrious Hana to provide for Kimiko, Ran and Momoko, in order to keep them by her side.
The novel’s central question is this: can these afflicted people find community and security outside of the households they were born into, or is everyone willing to manipulate and deceive those around them if the situation calls for it? Kawakami consistently demonstrates that the water of the womb is not particularly thick, but neither is the blood of the covenant.
Hana’s travails tug at you: she wants to be cared for, to relinquish responsibility to a knowledgeable adult. This is, in part, how she starts committing low-level crimes. The adults who come to her aid include Yeongsu and Viv, who are the minds behind a number of petty money-making schemes. They become her mentors in crime as together they carry out low-level scams.
Set in 1990s Tokyo, references to Y2K abound, and the girls spend the bulk of their free time in McDonalds, signalling the steady encroachment of globalisation. Kawakami has evidently done her research, and uses it liberally: the thought process of gambling addicts, the way gangs run the markets, the threat of faceless triads arriving from abroad to usurp the Yakuza with their well-established codes and commitment to accountability. Still, Kawakami is somewhat risk-averse and conservative; most of the high-stakes, high-level crime, like the gangs or uxoricide, is referenced, sometimes third-hand, but never shown.
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To promote her new title, Kawakami paired up with a coffee company to create her own blend. Such publicity campaigns are not uncommon in Japan, where anime releases are often accompanied by bespoke convenience store curries, but the novelty coffee speaks to the distinctly commercial strategy and appeal of Sisters in Yellow compared to its more literary predecessors. This departure is likely a bid to maintain the momentum of her success and broaden her audience. While it was well-received at home, critics and readers did note the shift; the absence of that ‘literary quality’ she is known for. Kawakami’s writing is, at times, prone to the cliché: if a character is distressed, they have dark circles around their eyes and sunken cheeks, and bad feelings are cast off ‘like a magic trick, like someone had snapped their fingers and everything before me disappeared’. It was with the best-selling Breasts and Eggs, published in the UK in 2021, that Kawakami became a sensation, making a name for herself as both an unrivalled feminist writer and a literary darling. But those reading Sisters in Yellow expecting Breasts and Eggs will be disappointed.
In an interview, Kawakami stated that she didn’t intend Sisters in Yellow to be a parable for social ills and evils. It’s exactly this tendency, however, that makes her writing resonate. Breasts and Eggs worked because of Kawakami’s sermonising, her clever distillation of the challenges of womanhood, eked out throughout a well-crafted plot. It articulated an anti-natalist thesis that has lingered in my mind for years: is bringing a child into this world an inherently selfish and violent act?
The notion that it is cruel to give birth to an unwitting child rests on the premise that life is rife with suffering, and Yuriko, the character who acts as a projection for this case, has suffered in the immoderate way Kawakami’s characters do: she is raped by her father and his friends, and her mother never really wanted her. ‘Once you have children, you can’t unhave them,’ Yuriko says. ‘You force this other being into the world, this being that never asked to be born. You do this absurd thing because that’s what you want for yourself.’ Birth is the ultimate absence of agency.
Viv, the older woman in Sisters in Yellow who enlists Hana into her credit card schemes, sets out her own, similar manifesto: ‘Money is power, and poverty is violence.’ Other unsubtle aphorisms include: ‘there’s no reason you were born poor’, ‘there’s only so much cash out there. If the rich have the money, that means you’ll never get it’, ‘poor people get sucked dry … when you’re nothing but dregs, they’ll make you think it was your fault you failed at life’. Many characters in this book embody the cliché of the weathered, cynical veteran in a police procedural concerned with how corrupt society is.
According to Viv, the ‘rich morons’ who inherited their wealth are deserving victims. She might be right, but she is unvindicated; no one in Sisters in Yellow is released from their disreputable lives by eating the rich. There’s a suffocating inevitability. There’s no picking themselves up from the bootstraps – no way to fight systematic and institutionalised discrimination against the lower classes. The characters alternate between action and lethargy; the impetus to do well, and the weight of their fates. Kawakami doesn’t discriminate: both rich and poor are victims to scams, but they are far more devastating for someone who has toiled albeit in unsavoury work.
What Kawakami intended for the book was to bear witness to the ‘helplessness, hardships, beauty’ that life entails. She wanted to document rather than to interrogate. But her accounts of the hardships would resonate more if it didn’t read like a salvo of everything bad, where the impact of each successive misfortune is enfeebled, and the scale of suffering leaves the reader somewhat incredulous.
The almost episodic pacing – jumping from vice to tragedy, betrayal to plot – can be attributed to the fact that Sisters in Yellow was initially serialised in a newspaper over the course of a year. Rather than meticulously planning the plot, ‘it felt like I was writing about the people I met and their stories, experiences, and what they witnessed’, Kawakami said in the same interview. Still, her effort to document so many different lives resulted in each instance of suffering becoming redundant in their plurality – Kawakami’s gaze is more a fleeting glance than that of a witness. And though this works in Breasts and Eggs, which was born as a novella and transformed into a full-length novel, Sisters in Yellow is let down by its four hundred and forty-eight pages.
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Fonie Mitsopoulou is a (mostly) London-based writer and journalist. She has written for POLITICO, Prospect and The Fence, with fiction in Notch Magazine.
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