Sisters in Yellow

by Mieko Kawakami

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction; Thrillers; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

From Mieko Kawakami, award-winning author of Breasts and Eggs, comes a bold novel of sacrifice and the tumultuous bonds of sisterhood, set in the gritty Tokyo of the 1990s.

“I can never forget the sense of pure astonishment I felt when I first read Mieko Kawakami.” —Haruki Murakami

Hana has nothing – she’s fifteen years old and living in a tiny apartment in a suburb of Tokyo with her young mother, a hostess at a local dive bar. They have no money, no security. Then Kimiko appears.

Kimiko is older, a bright light in Hana’s dark world. Together they set up Lemon, a bar that, despite its shabby setting and seedy clientele, becomes a haven for Hana. Suddenly Hana has a job she loves, friends to share her days with, and the glittering promise of money. She feels like a normal girl. She feels invincible.

But in the narrow alleys of Sangenjaya, nothing is as it seems. Soon all of Hana’s hope, her optimism, and her drive will be pushed to the limit . . .

A story of enduring friendship and deep betrayal, Sisters in Yellow is a masterpiece of teenage dreams and adult cruelties that confirms Mieko Kawakami as one of the great writers of her generation.

Release date: March 17, 2026

Publisher: Knopf

Print pages: 448

Sample

PREMONITION

1.
I first met Ran Kato out on the street.
Whenever I went outside to see a customer off or to go home after closing up the bar for the night, there was always a group of girls by the main drag, handing out fliers and pulling in customers. Ran was one of those girls.
She was petite and always wore the same pair of rhinestone-studded hot pink platform sandals. Her hair was bleached, almost blonde, and she had a narrow forehead. Her eyebrows were plucked thin, and her makeup stood out, too, her eyes accentuated in a dusting of white shimmer.
“Hi there,” Ran said to me one night in early December. “Cold, isn’t it? I’ve seen you around.”
“Hi. Is it just you out here today?”
Kimiko had asked me to go to the drugstore to pick up a bottled energy shot. It was around nine.
“Yeah, all the other girls have customers. Except for me.” Ran was wearing an oversized white bomber jacket and a strappy black dress that hugged her body. “It’s kind of dead around here today, don’t you think?” she asked with an exaggerated shiver. “You work around here, too, right?”
I turned to point toward our building and told her I worked at the bar on the third floor. Just then, En came out of Little Heaven to see a customer off. I waved. She waved back, then ducked inside.
“A bar? What’s it called?”
“Lemon.”
“Lemon? I don’t think I’ve heard of it.”
“We’re still pretty new. We’ve only been open a couple of months.”
“I’m over there, down the street. You know that big building? The one with the huge atrium? I work on the second floor at the cabaret club.”
“There’s a club over there?”
“Yup. We probably don’t have the same customers though.” A gust of cold wind blew between us. I smiled to let her know I was heading back, and Ran, arms crossed and hunched against the cold, shook her whole body like she was waving me off.
“Hey, Kimiko, did you know there was a cabaret club around here?”
Back upstairs, I handed the energy shot to Kimiko, who was slumped down in one of the booths. She twisted off the cap with a heavy sigh, then drank it slowly. She’d been under the weather for about a week now, making it through the nights with over-the-counter medicine and energy shots, and spending her days lying in bed.
“Ugh, why does this have to be so syrupy . . . Uh, what were you saying? A cabaret club? Yeah, maybe . . .”
“I was chatting with one of the girls from there just now.”
“Huh. I guess it’s a quiet day for everybody.”
“How are you feeling?” I asked. “All achy.”
“Kimiko, if you don’t get better by next week, you should see a doctor.”
“Yeah, I know.”
At the end of December, it would be a full three months since we opened. I was getting used to the job, and Lemon was doing all right. We inherited more than a few customers from Mama Atsuko, and got some new ones, too. Maybe sixty percent of them were older men who were Sangenjaya locals. Thirty per-cent were younger men—first-timers who happened to come in one day and came back every once in a while. The other ten percent were people who worked at other clubs and bars in the neighborhood. In that sense, no one was really a stranger. We had a good number of regulars who showed up at the bar like they were stopping by their local café to read the newspaper.
Customers had a few options for how they spent their money. Some went with our all-you-can-sing, all-you-can-drink option, which cost ¥4,000, plus the drinks they bought for us. So if they stayed for two hours or so, they’d pay about ¥6,000. Some bought bottles to keep at the bar, so they only paid for the mixers each time they came, but they tended to come a lot—some maybe three times a week. Then there were the people who ordered what they wanted à la carte. For them, the cover charge was ¥3,000; then they’d pay for karaoke and drinks on top of that. They were the ones who ended up spending the most.
I’d developed a taste and tolerance for beer, so I got straight to work whenever a generous customer came in and encouraged us to let loose. A medium bottle cost ¥800, so if they ordered three, that came to ¥2,400. At the restaurant where I used to work, that would have been almost four hours of work. It seemed too good to be true—to be able to make the same amount of money by just sitting there and drinking beer all night. On a good day, it wasn’t unusual to make ¥10,000 or even ¥20,000 off a single customer.
Each day was different, like the weather or your mood, but on average, Lemon was pulling in around ¥30,000 a night. On top of that, Kotomi came by maybe twice a month, bringing her fancy customers from Ginza, and they were on a completely different level from our normal crowd, spending way more money than any of the regulars. And that meant that we made a lot more each month.
Plus, there was something special about the people who came to Lemon.
It was like they were all members of the same group, even the other bar and club workers from the neighborhood. Everyone got along and enjoyed each other’s company; no one seemed to mind when Kimiko and I spent our time at other tables. We had four bar stools and three booths, so even at full capacity, we only had about a dozen customers in the place. Maybe that’s what gave Lemon such a community feel. Once in a while, some first-timers would get angry about not getting enough attention from us and demand their money back. But Kimiko never seemed bothered about it. She always knew how to get those customers to calm down and go home. “Just forget about them,” she’d tell me with a smile, but when that kind of thing happened, it always weighed heavy on me, and sometimes I’d stay awake all night thinking about it.
“Hey, Kimiko, I know we’ve kept everything under control so far, but I was thinking . . . what happens if one of us gets sick or something? What do we do then?”
“Are you saying we should hire some help?”
“Yeah . . . maybe one more person, like somebody to work part-time? We’ve been getting more customers, too. It feels like a missed opportunity when they leave unsatisfied. Who knows, maybe they could have become regulars. It’s probably too close to the holidays for us to find somebody now, but maybe in the new year?”
“Maybe, yeah.”
I tried bringing up the idea of hiring help with Kimiko a couple more times, but she never seemed that interested. It was the same when it came to money. I’d get all excited and tell her how much we’d made that month, and she’d smile and act happy, but it never seemed like it brought her the same kind of satisfaction it brought me.
So I ended up being in charge of the finances, too, taking care of things like paying our bills and keeping track of our profits.
It just sort of worked out that way, and plus it wasn’t that complicated. All I had to do was go to the bank every month and pay our bills in cash: rent for Lemon and the apartment we shared, alcohol expenses and hot towel service for the bar, and our utilities. That was it. We never really talked about how to divide our earnings either. We had a bowl we kept next to the TV where we’d put money for day-to-day expenses, just like my mom and I used to do. Whenever we ran out, we put more in. I always made sure I had ¥5,000 in my wallet, and Kimiko still kept small bills and loose change in her pockets.
I kept the rest of our money in a sturdy cardboard box with a lid. Ever since the Snoozy incident, part of me thought it might be safer to put our money in the bank. But all I brought when I left home were some clothes and underwear, and my navy shoebox. 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 for us.
I didn’t feel like there was any need to worry, though. People weren’t coming and going into our apartment like they did when I lived with my mom. Still, on the way home from Lemon one night, I found a big, flat, round stone—like the kind people used to weigh down vegetables in a pickling barrel—and brought it home. I scrubbed the stone clean in the bathtub and placed it on top of our money box, just to be safe.


December was flying by. In the rush toward the end of the year, the city, the people, and time itself were all buzzing with a hectic energy. Everywhere I went, things seemed to twinkle and shine, and lively music filled the spaces between the shimmering lights.
So this is what the holidays are like in the city, I thought. It wasn’t like holidays in the town where I’d grown up, even the busier shopping districts I’d known as a kid were never like this. And if this is what it’s like in Sangenjaya, just imagine Shinjuku or Shibuya. Those places were only a few train stops away, but they still only existed as concepts to me—place names and images of busy intersections I sometimes saw on TV. Whenever I thought about that lavish, unreal world, it made me think about Kotomi and the fancy club in Ginza where she worked. I didn’t know the first thing about Tokyo—I didn’t even know how to get to Ginza on the train if I wanted to. Whenever Kotomi came to Lemon, towing along men who spent huge amounts of money without batting an eye, she practically glowed like she’d been sprinkled from head to toe in fairy dust. Is Ginza full of people like her? It has to be, I thought.
In the clubs in Ginza, expensive champagne and brandy flew off the shelves, each bottle worth what normal people spend a month struggling to earn. And not just in one business either—it was happening in countless bars and clubs all at the same time.
Beautiful women, laughter, music from the grand piano, big bills everywhere. Gleaming black marble surfaces, effervescent champagne bubbles streaming out of long-necked bottles— scene after scene, soaked in wealth and luxury, whirled together in my mind. All I could do was sigh.
Lemon was nothing like a Ginza club, of course, but we made it through our first Christmas well enough and closed up for the holidays a couple of days later. Kimiko and I didn’t have anywhere we wanted to go or anything we wanted to do, so we would have been fine keeping the bar open. But our hot towel service and liquor supplier were closed for the holidays, and we figured nobody would show up anyway, so we decided to call it a year.
“Are you going back to Ai’s place for New Year’s, Hana?” Kimiko asked as she ran a dustcloth over the wall.
She said she was doing the big end-of-year cleaning, but there wasn’t much for her to do. We didn’t have a lot of stuff to begin with, and she was always cleaning. As Kimiko wiped the walls, I lay against my folded-up futon and watched her making little circles with one hand.
“Nah, I’m not.”
“Have you talked with her recently?”
“No, I don’t have anything to say to her, so why waste money on the call? Doesn’t she call you sometimes?”
“Nope.”
“Huh . . . That makes sense, I guess.”
I hadn’t spoken to my mom since I left home at the end of the summer.
That day—the day I ran into Kimiko on the street—I left home and started living with her. And back then I was excited to be leaving, but also afraid—like maybe I was making a huge mistake. My mom was always off in her own world, doing whatever she wanted, and that was exactly why I worried about her. Moving in with Kimiko, I felt like I was abandoning my mom—maybe she wanted out just as bad, and here I was leaving without her. I was torn with guilt.
If my mom begged me to come home, what would I do? I gave it some thought, but the more I thought about it, the more confused and upset I became. Was she going to be able to make it on her own? What if she got caught up in some kind of trouble? Was she worried sick about me? I blamed myself for making the huge mistake of leaving without even telling her where I was going.
But it turned out I’d been wasting my time worrying. My mom didn’t even realize I was gone until more than a week later. When Kimiko got a call from her and handed me the phone, panic welled up in me. On the other end of the line, my mom started talking like normal, like everything was the same as always. She went on and on about how she was thinking about getting her driver’s license, about the different options for driving school, about the cats she’d seen in the display window of some new pet shop. The longer I listened, the harder it got for me. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I blurted, “Mom, I’m going to live with Kimiko from now on.” Without missing a beat, she replied, “Sure, Hana, if that’s what you want”—like I was asking her what she thought of my new hairstyle. She didn’t ask me if I would keep going to school, or what I was going to do for money. She didn’t ask me anything about my life. I half expected her to tell me it was out of the question, or that I should come home first so we could talk it over. But no. She wasn’t sad, she wasn’t angry. “You’ve always been so responsible, Hana. And you’re an adult now. Besides, you’ve got Kimi there. If you need me, you know where to find me, okay?” She said it all so cheerfully—then she hung up.