Sisters in Yellow

In the spring of 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, 40-year-old Hana Ito, a deli salesclerk in Tokyo, stumbles on an online article reporting that Kimiko Yoshikawa has been charged with confining and battering a young woman in her Shinjuku apartment. The name triggers a flood of long-suppressed memories. Hana realizes she has spent two decades forgetting Kimiko and everything that happened between them.

Hana retrieves an old flip phone from a navy shoebox she has kept since childhood and finds contact information for Ran Kato and Momoko Tamamori, two women who once shared a house with her and Kimiko in the late 1990s. Terrified that a police investigation could expose their criminal past, Hana calls Ran, who insists the past should stay buried and tells Hana that Momoko disappeared years ago. The novel then plunges into an extended flashback spanning roughly five years of Hana's adolescence and young adulthood.

At 15, Hana lives with her neglectful mother, Ai, in a crumbling tenement in Higashimurayama, on the outskirts of western Tokyo. One summer, Kimiko, a 35-year-old friend of Ai's from the nightlife world, comes to stay while Ai is away with a boyfriend. Over the following weeks, the two form a deep bond. Kimiko teaches Hana about feng shui, a practice linking cardinal directions and colors to fortune, telling her that placing yellow objects in the west of a home attracts money. When school resumes, Kimiko disappears without warning, leaving Hana devastated.

During high school, Hana works at a family restaurant and saves ¥726,000, but she believes the money is stolen by Ai's ex-boyfriend, a man nicknamed Snoozy, who vanishes without a trace. Devastated, Hana encounters Kimiko again by chance and agrees to leave home with her.

Kimiko has taken over a bar near Sangenjaya Station in central Tokyo, and Hana names it Lemon, after the yellow fruit that echoes Kimiko's name and their shared belief in yellow as a color of fortune. On opening night, Hana meets Kotomi, a hostess at a gentlemen's club in the upscale Ginza district, and An Yeongsu, a quiet Korean-Japanese man who regularly delivers envelopes of cash to Kimiko. Over the following months, Hana befriends Ran, a young woman at a nearby cabaret club, and Momoko, a sardonic high school student with a remarkable singing voice. The three become inseparable.

One Sunday, Hana discovers Yeongsu using Lemon for illegal sports-betting. Over drinks at an izakaya, a Japanese-style pub, Yeongsu shares his own background of poverty and ethnic discrimination before revealing Kimiko's past: Kimiko's mother is in prison for arson, Kimiko grew up in foster care, and she has cognitive limitations that make abstract thinking difficult. The blue dot tattooed on Kimiko's right hand was inked by her mother to help her distinguish left from right. The cash envelopes fund her mother's debts through an insurance fraud scheme. Yeongsu warns Hana never to expose her own vulnerabilities.

In November 1998, the four women move into a house in Shimouma that Jin-ji, Lemon's landlord, rents them cheaply on a verbal contract. Hana hides their savings in her navy shoebox in a ceiling panel. In January 1999, Ai appears and begs for ¥2 million, having fallen prey to a pyramid-style scheme. Hana hands over nearly everything. Weeks later, a fire in the building's ground-floor restaurant destroys the entire structure, and Lemon is gone.

With no income, Hana turns to Yeongsu, who introduces her to Vivien, known as Viv, a middle-aged woman who runs credit card fraud operations. Viv gives Hana forged debit cards cloned from wealthy people's accounts and instructs her to withdraw cash from ATMs. Hana's first withdrawal is terrifying, but she completes it, earning ¥150,000 per round while keeping her criminal work secret from the others. Viv shares her philosophy over expensive dinners: that poverty is a form of violence, and that stealing from people who never notice the loss is justified.

When Ran quits her cabaret job after being bullied and Momoko drops out of school and falls into debt with a party promoter, Hana asks Viv for permission to expand. Viv supplies flagged credit cards, ones already marked as suspicious by issuers. Hana recruits Ran and Momoko for team runs: wearing plain office clothes, they purchase gift cards and Shinkansen high-speed rail tickets at department stores using stolen cards, then resell them for cash. Their savings swell rapidly.

Hana assigns Kimiko the role of household treasurer, guarding and counting the cash daily. She institutes rigid house rules, daily meetings, phone checks, and mandatory written logs of everyone's movements. When Momoko's sister, Shizuka, shows up demanding that Momoko deal with the party promoter's associates, Hana sends her away. Her controlling behavior intensifies until she paints the living room walls yellow in a frenetic overnight session, convinced that neglecting the color has jinxed their fortune. Ran and Momoko grow resentful, demanding to know when the money will be split.

Viv pushes Hana into a new scheme: installing skimmers on credit card readers at the Ginza club where Kotomi works to harvest customer data for overseas sale. One evening, over karaoke, Hana drunkenly reveals that Yeongsu has located Jihun, a friend from Yeongsu's past, alive in Osaka. Yeongsu had asked her to keep this secret, but Kotomi decides to go find Jihun. That same night, Hana returns home to find Momoko trying to flee with the money. A violent struggle breaks out, and Momoko falls down the stairs. Momoko and Ran demand the savings, now over ¥21 million, be split equally.

In August, Yeongsu delivers catastrophic news: Viv has absconded with millions, collapsing their last income source. Then he calls again. Kotomi is dead. Her boyfriend, Oikawa, a yakuza member, hanged himself while on methamphetamine, and Kotomi choked to death on her own vomit after using drugs. Yeongsu suspects Oikawa killed Kotomi upon discovering she planned to leave for Osaka. Hana realizes her indiscretion at karaoke may have set these events in motion.

Hana's mental state collapses. She stops sleeping, scrapes the yellow paint off the walls with a box cutter, and experiences hallucinations. Ran and Momoko intervene, insisting they were all exploited by the adults around them. They split the money four ways, roughly ¥5 million each, and leave Kimiko's share behind. In the early morning, Hana takes one last look at the sleeping Kimiko, grabs an extra bundle of cash, and walks out.

The narrative returns to 2020. In the intervening decades, Hana walked back to Higashimurayama, lived with her mother, worked cleaning jobs, and gradually forgot everything. Her mother died of a heart attack at 59, leaving ¥73,000 in an envelope marked "For Hana." Hana sank into depression before slowly recovering.

In June 2020, Hana reaches Yeongsu by phone. He sounds frail and reveals serious kidney and liver disease. He confirms Kimiko received a suspended sentence and lives alone in an old bar building in Higashimurayama. In late August, Hana travels there. After a long wait at the door, Kimiko appears, gray-haired and gaunt, aged far beyond her 60 years, the blue tattoo dot on her right hand still visible. Kimiko does not fully recognize Hana or remember their shared past. Hana asks Kimiko to come live with her, but Kimiko declines, saying she stays because she can see her mother, Kotomi, and Yeongsu there. Hana promises to visit again. Kimiko smiles, goes inside, and closes the door. Hana boards a westbound train and falls asleep as a vast sunset fills the window.