The Yellow House—Where It All Began
- Kanae
- Feb 26
- 4 min read
Do you still remember?
The child you once were.
What thoughts filled your mind? What kind of child were you? What expressions did you wear? How did you fall, and how much did you cry before you grew up?
Do you hold more good memories, or are the painful ones all that come back to you?
I read The Yellow House by Mieko Kawakami. I don’t know if I have thoughts about it. If I had to put it in one word, I’d say it left me feeling empty.
For those who haven’t read it yet, I want you to experience it yourself—so I won’t reveal too much.
The story follows a young girl raised by a mother who works at a bar, a mother who lacks a sense of social responsibility. In a world where she’s expected to be self-reliant from an early age, the girl learns to navigate her circumstances, making her own judgments and confronting her reality head-on. She stumbles through life, influenced by the people she meets along the way.
It’s not a book that leaves you with a sense of closure. If anything, it lingers in a hollow, unsettling way. So much happens in the story, yet by the end, it feels as if nothing really happened at all—like a parallel world existing just outside our reach. Maybe when people find themselves in the eye of a storm, their memories of it become fragmented, as if it all happened to someone else.
Memories of childhood are vivid yet hazy. They feel bright and full of color, but at the same time, that brightness seems artificially painted on—uncertain, unreliable.
I grew up with a parent who worked at night. That was my normal, a life I never questioned. Unlike the mother in the book, mine was financially responsible, so our circumstances were different. Still, I couldn’t help but recall my own childhood as I read.
Most nights, my parents weren’t home, so I stayed with my grandparents. Those nights were colored with a different kind of happiness.
My grandmother would put me to bed, and later, I’d be woken by the cold night air. My father, returning from work, would pick me up and carry me home. I remember the contrast—the sharp chill of the wind against the warmth of his embrace. In that moment, the loneliness I didn’t even know I felt would quietly dissolve. I loved that feeling. I wanted to stay in that warmth forever, so I’d pretend to be asleep just a little longer.
Thursdays were my favorite because I didn’t have to go to daycare. It was the one day I could spend the afternoon with my mom. We’d get takeout from CoCo Ichibanya and eat curry in bed, using a chair as our table. The men who called my mother “Mama” took me to all kinds of places, and the women who called her “Mama” gifted me toy lipsticks.
Even as a child, I could sense that my life didn’t quite match the “normal” I heard about at school. But that difference didn’t mean I was unhappy. If anything, it taught me the importance of defining things on my own terms.
Even now, the world is filled with all kinds of people.
New York, the city I live in, prides itself on its diversity, yet to me, the social divide feels even starker than in Japan. It’s like we’re aliens from different planets, coexisting in the same city but without truly crossing paths, as if we’ve silently given up on ever understanding one another.
It’s easy to say, “We’re all different, and that’s okay.” But is that really acceptance? Or is it just a convenient way of keeping our distance? Maybe it’s indifference that allows us to tolerate other worlds without questioning them too deeply.
The difficulty of navigating society based on your upbringing or profession stems from this alienation—from being treated as something foreign. If people really understood what life in the nightlife industry entailed, they wouldn’t romanticize it or call it cool. That kind of shallow praise, dressed up as “celebrating diversity,” only deepens our isolation.
A society that preaches diversity without making the effort to understand it is nothing more than a facade. The Yellow House reminds us of that.
None of us get to choose where we begin.
And if we never try to reach across worlds different from our own, we remain frogs in a well—forever seeing only our small sky. There are things we’d be spared from if we simply chose not to know. But how much courage do we have to step beyond our starting place, to risk getting hurt in the process?
Only when we do that can we begin to see ourselves through the eyes of others, and in turn, face them with honesty.
The struggles you carry won’t just disappear.
But by understanding the struggles of others—those different from yours—perhaps someone, somewhere, will find a little comfort. Perhaps someone will be saved.
Happiness comes in many forms.
Maybe it’s yellow, like the house in the book. Maybe it’s in the scent of grilled meat wafting through the house at 4 AM when my parents came home.
Maybe it’s something we’ve idealized. Maybe it never even happened. Maybe it only exists in our memory.
Still, the little versions of ourselves felt everything.
And with those distant memories, they still live inside us today.
So, what color is your home now?
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