Mieko Kawakami’s Sisters in Yellow is one of those novels that raise their audience for slaughter. I lay still as a corpse after I finished it, both hands clasped to my copy as I considered the life I was leaving behind: the story’s still-beating heart.

At over 400 pages, it is neither Kawakami’s longest novel nor her most disturbing, yet I found myself gasping for air between one wrenching scene and the next. Tension radiates from the page like oppressive heat, forcing the reader’s nose to the grindstone alongside Hana, the narrator, who never seems to catch a break.

When we first meet her, she’s a middle-aged woman in Tokyo whose modest lifestyle prioritizes work at the expense of her personal life. Covid has just hit Japan and sets the story’s paranoid, claustrophobic tone. But Hana’s mind is on other things — namely, a police report detailing the crimes of a woman named Kimiko, whom Hana once thought she would “never forget.”

Flashback to the day they met: It’s the 1990s, and Hana is 15 years old. Kimiko enters Hana’s life as a friend of her mother, who’s given to disappearing and is liable to invite strangers to stay the night. In the wake of another of her mother’s mysterious desertions, the teenage Hana comes to depend on Kimiko — who is utterly present in ways her mother is not — for several months. When Hana’s mother returns, the girl yearns for the steady dependability she enjoyed with Kimiko.

Crucially, Hana’s world revolves around money. Her mother doesn’t know how to save her earnings, but Kimiko — who does — filled the fridge with groceries, giving Hana a taste of what she was missing. Soon, Hana devotes herself to working after school, squirreling away her paychecks in an attempt to establish some financial security. When a terrible accident dashes her hopes, Hana abandons her mother and high school to follow Kimiko to a new opportunity.

Together, Hana and Kimiko open Lemon, a bar named for their favorite color. Feng shui associates yellow with wealth and success, and Kimiko’s name is spelled with the kanji character for “yellow.” Through Lemon, Hana meets intriguing characters who introduce her to Tokyo’s seedy underbelly of scam artists and professional gamblers, lesser-known crime syndicates and the infamous Yakuza.

Despite Hana’s compulsive gestures of worship toward the color yellow, her luck runs out, leaving her little choice but to seek employment with a friend-of-a-friend named Viv, the criminal equivalent of a middle manager. Working for Viv, Hana pours herself into providing for Kimiko and herself, desperate to protect their fragile home.

Along the way, she invites fellow runaways Momoko and Ran to join her. Though the two are Hana’s age, Hana increasingly alienates herself from them in her frantic efforts to support the entire household. She finds space for them, delegates chores, pays off their debts, and even employs them. Poignantly, Hana’s deepest wish is to recreate those idyllic months of adolescence spent with Kimiko. Unfortunately, the harder Hana works to protect her feckless housemates, the more bitter she becomes. Even Kimiko has become a shell of herself, acting more like Hana’s dependent than the grown woman she is.

Still, Hana is loyal to Kimiko — and to her network of felonious friends. Instead of blaming Kimiko when the pressure mounts, Hana takes out her stress on Momoko and Ran. The three girls initially bonded over their shared runaway status, but their differences inevitably drive a wedge between them. Momoko was born into a wealthy family, while Hana and Ran grew up poor. Both Ran and Momoko have boyfriends (sleazy as they are) to fall back on for support, whereas Hana finds men repulsive. As they live and work together, the girls unwittingly recreate the patterns of abuse from their traumatic childhoods and must deal with the fallout.

Sisters in Yellow is about mothers and daughters, intimate strangers, and the fracturing pressure of poverty. In it, Kawakami portrays a bygone era through a lens informed by the pandemic and not a lick of nostalgia. For the women in the novel, nothing ever changes — they just learn to forget.

Madeleine de Visé is a bookseller in Baltimore, MD.