We Should All Be Sisters

In early 2022, some 13-year-olds from my high school alma mater — an all-girls high school — in censoriously strict Singapore got into trouble for pagan worship. In the high-stress academic environment of Singapore, the kids had gathered around the statue of Athena, housed on the school grounds, "dancing, chanting, and praying" to her for wisdom for their exams — a very funny image quite unlike stereotypical images of stressed-out Singaporean schoolgirls, spines curved over their desks. Through their idiosyncrasies and wry sense of humor, they manifested the joy of unbridled expression: the pleasures that arise out of not merely being naughty and/or nice, but of being girls under the watchful disciplining eye of a paternalistic society whose mechanisms reach even (or especially) into the space of an all-girls high school. Women and girls who toe the line of what is acceptable, who dance at the edges, and who push boundaries in ways both radical and quotidian, have long been read as troublemakers.

Bonnie Honig's latest book, A Feminist Theory of Refusal, takes on one such tale: The Bacchae, Euripides's fifth-century tragedy about the wine god Dionysus and the wayward women of Thebes, including Queen Agave, who, in the paroxysms of a frenzy, tears apart her son Pentheus. Honig suggests that the bacchants have been misread and recuperates them by reading The Bacchae as a tale of feminist refusal. She subverts the surface reading of the play by taking the women's wanton follies and even their murder seriously, suggesting that the women might not merely be mad, that they "reject work, not out of laziness, but because they have had enough of women's routine obedience." Their "arc of refusal" can, Honig argues, "inspire a new feminist politics of refusal."

In Honig's construction, the feminist refusal embedded in the actions of the bacchant should be viewed as deliberate — and also violent and anarchic — refusals of female domesticity. Given Honig's spectacular example, I want to add to expand the archive of feminist refusals by looking at Hirokazu Koreeda's 2015 film, Our Little Sister. Koreeda's film also puts forth an example of feminist refusal through sorority, but the refusal is cast in the undramatic yet powerful light of family.1 I draw and expand on Sarah Bernstein's and Yanbing Er's argument to view "refusal as a strategy that . . . disrupts the organizing logics of violence exemplified by the current moment,"2 as not only recasting violence in the light of refusal and regeneration but as a renunciation of violence as either retaliation or a Bartleby-like refusal to engage. I suggest that this thus models the "existence of other, more ethical lifeworlds" not in fact "speculative," but already here. Inspired by Honig's framework of feminist refusal, I borrow from and build on it further here to adumbrate what I am constructing as a form of "yellow feminism" in order to recuperate a stereotyped and condemned version of Asian female domesticity that has been framed as weak, parochial, and submissive, demonstrating instead that such figures of Asian sisterly care in fact constitute not only a powerful bulwark against the toxicities of patriarchy and capitalism, but also a model of a sororal public sphere.   

While Koreeda has been compared to the late, great Yasujiro Ozu, (the seaside vignettes of Our Little Sister visually and tonally echo with Ozu's Tokyo Story), Koreeda views his own work as closer to the likes of social realist filmmaker Ken Loach.3 Yet even though Koreeda may find more affinity with British Loach than Japanese Ozu, the content and subject of his films are mostly Japanese. Our Little Sister is adapted from shojo manga artist Akimi Yoshida's "Umimachi Diary" ("Diary of a Seaside Town"), and the four sisters in the film recall the four sisters in Sasameyuki/The Makioka Sisters by the novelist Tanizaki Junichiro, adapted into a 1983 film by Ichikawa Kon. I highlight these geographically and culturally specific elements and influences in order to draw out what I am identifying as recognizably Asian or "yellow" elements of this construction of feminist refusal, one that is quiet and domestic, and very unlike a Western brand of feminism that prizes individuality and which demonstrates its commitment to disruption in its willingness to destroy familial ties if those ties also manifest as patriarchal (Agave kills Pentheus even though he is her son because he is also her King).

Although I had attended the above-mentioned girls' high school, my experiences with such sororal environments began earlier and more intimately. So, I recognized the girls' silliness not only as examples of the same adolescent reveries that I myself had indulged in, but as one uniquely borne out of being held in a sororal space — a sisterly environment that, in being capacious and generous, acts like D.W. Winnicott's good-enough mother, allowing girls the fullest expression of themselves. Koreeda's Our Little Sister induces an ache in my chest in part for personal reasons: I have two older sisters and I — well, I'm the little sister. Growing up in a family of girls is a precious thing. When one is the runt in a family of women, one's aspirations are framed relationally only to women.

Koreeda's film revolves around a family of sisters living in an old family house together in Kamakura, Japan. When their father, who abandoned them for the family he started with another woman, dies, they meet their half-sister at his funeral and invite her to live with them. The film unfolds undramatically, following the sisters as they, against stereotypical representations of catty and neurotic female families, refuse to engage in competition and actively choose kindness, empathy, and generosity at every turn. Their quiet support for each other, which enables each member to overcome their individual challenges, coalesces around family traditions, cultural practices, and their relationship to their community. With the family and sisterhood as a buttress against the capitalist selfishness of the patriarchy, the most powerful feminist act by this enclave of women is, quite simply, quotidian kindness. Within the framework of a family of women caring for each other, domesticity neither adds to nor subtracts from the power of their feminism.  In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas provides an account of the social history of the bourgeois public sphere's development, noting its origins in 18^th century convivial spaces such as salons. Yet these kernels of ideal community were mostly made up of male intellectuals and exclusive in relation to class, race, and gender. In Our Little Sister, this model is transposed into an old Japanese house and thereby transformed, as we see the sisters and members of their community gather to discuss and make decisions on the health of the family. The film thus offers sorority, female familial connections, as a corollary to the fraternal Habermasian ideal of a public sphere as a proliferative result of a kernel of ideal community communicating privately and unfolding outwards to comprise the public. The coda to Bonnie Honig's book, "Sister is an anagram for Resist," is true for the women in Our Little Sister, though in a dialectically apposite way to the women of The Bacchae.

For IndieWire's 2018 list of the best Japanese films of the twenty-first century, Christian Blauvelt wrote that "Kore-eda [sic] doesn't delve into the histrionics usually involved with depictions of 'broken families' in American films."4 Indeed, Koreeda might be seen as an anti-Noah Baumbach; the latter's portraits of American domesticity, which nearly always stage familial meltdowns, often uses the odiousness of characters to mime emotional depth. But Koreeda eschews this melodrama in his films and the contrast between the two filmmakers unmasks how unpleasantness often masquerades as complexity. Koreeda's film is full of quotidian acts of care: Yoshino paints Suzu's toenails, Chika shares her favourite food with Suzu, and the sisters patch up their old house together with new paper designs. These are acts which are no less powerful for their ordinariness, the unassuming praxis of which in fact highlights the awesome difficulty and actual rarity of repeated and consistent acts of consideration — a refusal to capitulate to a "justified" pettiness and reacting instead with decency that, contextualized within the framework of patriarchy and corrosive capitalism, is deeply noble.

The women in the film face a constant barrage of attacks against their calm family life which underscores how their sororal peacefulness is one that requires staunch, faithful, active safeguarding and is not in fact passive. When their grandaunt, suspicious and uncomprehending of their invitation to Suzu, provokes Sachi, the eldest sister, by saying, "She's the daughter of the woman who destroyed your family," Sachi responds unperturbed: "It doesn't matter; she wasn't even born yet."5 When second-eldest Yoshino's good-for-nothing boyfriend suggests that Suzu coming to live with them must be part of their father's widow's elaborate plan, Yoshino does not entertain the thought for even a second. He plants spiteful thoughts in her mind, voicing skeptical, calculating ideas like, "She's just your half-sister, right? . . . I bet she's just acting [so nice] . . . You decided to renounce the inheritance, right? With you taking care of Suzu, the widow's got it made."6 Even when Yoshino retorts that it was Suzu's decision, he pollutes the validity of her agency by presuming that Suzu's stepmother must have coached her. Yoshino never accepts this and when later, the boyfriend unceremoniously leaves her upon her learning that he has been lying to her, she never dwells on bad-mouthing him either, merely grieving the relationship and moving on.

Koreeda's depiction of these sisters is not unrealistic. The sisters are not saint-like; they squabble as sisters do over the smallest of things — a blouse borrowed without permission, an offendingly occupied bath when someone else has already called dibs. But, as Chika, the third sister notes, "[the sisters] may fight, but they are always on the same side when it matters." And this is what the security of love and of kinship — in all its forms, biological and otherwise — affords: the privilege to fight with the simultaneous confidence that the relationship is strong enough to withstand disagreement. In the crucible of their grandmother's old house, the sisters fight, get drunk, convalesce, and care for each other. They forswear the calculating attitude fed to them by others and refuse to engage in vengeful acts.

Under Koreeda's patient lens, what may appear to be a reinforcement of racialized and gendered stereotypes of Asian women is actually its radicalization. Their actions appear on the surface as facsimiles of the noble, self-sacrificing Asian woman — that trite figure — but are in fact deeply motivated by radical care. Further, the film's investment in sisterhood is not a sororal politics based on biological familial ties but one grounded in the enactment of those relations. Their generosity begins at home, but the film's real interest moves beyond that of the traditional family unit to those of community. The film is therefore invested not in the concretization of the biological familial unit, but in its dismantling. We see how the sisters' generosity extends to their half-sister and also observe how they are enveloped in — and return — the embrace of their wider community. This is most evident through the character of Ninomiya-san, a family friend who runs the little diner, and Fukuda Senichi, Ninomiya's partner who also runs a diner, who offers to tell Suzu stories about her father. Ninomiya-san, in being a kind neighbour who has "looked after them from when they were little kids," acts as both a surrogate mother and a sisterly figure, verifying their childhood memories at certain points, or sending one sister home with the favorite dishes of another.7

We also observe as Ninomiya is plagued with an avaricious brother who has returned to demand their mother's inheritance, forcing her to close the diner, their mother's legacy, in order to pay him. The pathos of this decision is doubly marked by our realization that Ninomiya-san is dying of a terminal illness. Biological ties are no guarantee of sibling decency, much less radical care. Here, Fukuda Senichi steps in to reassure that he will continue to serve Ninomiya's dishes over at his diner — that her brother can take the money but he cannot lay claim to her recipes. In safeguarding what is of true value to her, Fukuda demonstrates his dedication to the feminist enterprise too.

The film's purposeful "dilution" of the sisters' blood relation makes visible the ways in which the ties that bind the sisters to each other and to their community resembles yet transcends blood ties. The half-sister then is not a tool that fortifies biological relations — not even one that loosens its insular and contingent politics — but one that shores up how every outsider has the potential to become "one of us." Koreeda is deeply curious about what constitutes family and has explored these questions more broadly in other works. Many of Koreeda's films unravel and examine the connective tissues that make up a family. Are the ties that bind double-helixed? Like Father Like Son (2013), about two boys who were given to the wrong families at birth and are later "returned" to their biological parents, delves into these questions in the most obvious way, similar to Almodovar's recent Parallel Mothers,questioning our attachments to family as genetic inheritance, biology, and the traditional familial unit (though it ultimately capitulates to the law of the father). Most notably, the Palme D'Or winning Shoplifters (2018), about a family of misfits that takes in a neglected girl, illuminates these complex relations — all the members of the "family" turn out not to be related by blood at all.  

On the deep affection we hold for our siblings, Adam Smith writes in Theory of Moral Sentiment that "The earliest friendships, the friendships which are naturally contracted when the heart is most susceptible of that feeling, are those among brothers and sisters." But he crucially clarifies that "What is called affection, is in reality nothing but habitual sympathy." After all, as the OED defines sister8, it is possible for a sister not only to be non-familial, a sisterly relation is also an interpellation — an invitation and a relation that is brought into being in its being named. Yoshino herself describes their house as "a girls' dormitory," a declaration that defamiliarizes and also defamilializes their sisterly bond to one of any community of girls.

These are relations made possible from a complete and therefore capacious love — so unwavering that it is committed in advance to unquestioning acceptance and thus infinitely expands its capacity for forgiveness and understanding. But entering into such a form of love also means that its origins (biological or otherwise) cease being definitive. Loving one's sister as much as one does for being a sister no longer necessitates biological determinism to warrant the love one gives. It is this ethos that fills Sachi's life with meaning: because Sachi loves her sisters, because she cares so deeply about others as to care about care (work) itself, her choices are motivated not just by duty but by a commitment and a sincere desire to improve the lives of those around her. By the end of the film when she chooses not to leave with her lover, it is not so much that she sacrifices herself or that she does not follow her heart, but that she actively chooses to remain to build up the terminal care ward due to her belief in the importance of that work, made especially clear by dear Ninomiya's enrollment into the ward — her "no" to the heteronormative coupling, a "yes" to a sororal life that is at the center of her wider carework.

A superficial and stereotypical reading of Sachi might assume that she is willfully stagnant, refusing to move on with her life and seeking solace in the familiar comfort of her familial responsibilities. In taking in their younger sister, her aunt ruefully predicts that Sachi is further away than ever from getting married herself and will become an old maid. Yoshino teases that she is "becoming a mom even before she gets married." There is the insinuation that that even though, as her lover says, she had her childhood stolen from her and, in playing the role of parent in her parents' absence, was forced to grow up before her time, she has nonetheless, in another sense, failed to actually grow up. Her choices around her family and career are illegible or viewed as wrong because her approach to family and work rejects and disrupts a normative familial telos.

Another way that Koreeda stitches the biological to the nonbiological — or rather unseams the illogic of a biologically based relationality — is through a kind of transcendent ecstatic aesthetic. The film is slow but its seasonal changes rhapsodic. The extant, everyday beauty of the Japanese countryside coalesces to a breathtaking zenith, when a suggestion by Suzu's friend, Futa, to take a ride with him, ushers us down an avenue of evanescent sakura — the last of the season — so beautiful that they have the potential to arrest one with the force of a heart attack. This attention to beauty is a theme that arcs across the film and stitches its characters together. Both Ninomiya-san and their father are revealed to have made the same observation as they neared the end of their lives: "I'm glad that beauty is still beautiful to me." A seemingly apolitical aesthetic observation has the ability to be transcendentally revelatory — its tautological expression not devoid of meaning, but in fact lush with poignancy of a universal and brave truth. But there is a quieter truth embedded here; after all, Elaine Scarry explains that pain is dehumanizing — it undoes and unmakes us.9 The reason for their ability to reflect on beauty in the midst of great suffering is this: both were recipients of profound and nourishing care (their father by Suzu, and Ninomiya-san by Sachi and Fukada). While its vehicle is aesthetics, the film's ultimate reflection is on the radical power of care.

In his review of the film, Peter Bradshaw writes, "I can only say there is something subtly subversive in the emotional dynamic Kore-eda creates with having three or four women on screen."10 Indeed, I would suggest that something strongly subversive is underfoot. If this evades the reviewer, it seems to evade the filmmaker as well. Koreeda suggests that creating and filling gaps is what families are all about: "...we always try to get 'in between'. Something is missing, so we always try to take over. From the older generation to the next generation."11 The gaps in Koreeda's films manifest as paralepsis — a kind of saying through not-saying, or talking about not talking. It is in these fissures that something profound begins to come into focus. His films are suffused with the presence of things that are no longer there, the presence of a palpable absence. Koreeda chalks this up to narrative choice, as "It is important to have a story about a family with some family members missing. But someone else is there, trying to take over the role of parents."12

In fact, the absence that suffuses the film is a queerer one than this. In this quiet film about sisters, there is as much absence as there is a positive manifestation of emotion: an absence of greed, an absence of jealousy, an absence of vengeance. Free to discard the damaged relation inherited through their father's betrayal, they instead actively choose to repair it in the only way that is possible, through sustained and repeated acts of care. We never see the offending father, encountering him obliquely as dispersed smoke particles in the air at his cremation as Sachi delivers an unflinching, informal eulogy: "He was kind and useless. He guaranteed a friend's loan and went into debt. He sympathized with women and got into affairs."13 By the end of the film, this feeling is addended and attenuated, and Sachi appraises him not through who he was or even through his actions, but by the child he left behind: "Dad was really useless, but maybe he was a kind man . . . Because he left us with such a lovely little sister."14 The absence of the father — his failures and abandonment — is, thanks to the sisters, not a gap or a wound, but a proliferative opening that is abundantly, overflowingly, tended to by the sisters and thus filled with the fecundity of their care. Sachi's revelation as the four sisters gather on the beach in the last scene is quadruply touching, for by that same measure she, and her other two sisters, also serve to augment their father's legacy as the other three lovely daughters he left behind. In fact, all this says next to nothing about their father, and everything about the open-hearted generosity of these women. In this way, the fracture in the family is healed through sorority.

But the fracture is not only paternal but maternal as well, for their mother abandons them soon as their father leaves. This double betrayal makes the typical reliance on the maternal for solutions of feminist repair impossible. Our Little Sister asks, as Honig does, what happens when our focus is shifted from "the maternal to the sororal plane"? By Honig's reading, "agonistic sororal action in concert" (58) is "generative and caring, violent and murderous." There is, of course, reason for wanting to recuperate female violence since women and their desires have been perverted and demonized, but Our Little Sister does not rely on this recuperation at all. Abandoned by both father and mother, the sisters mother each other. In their particular domestic construction, in the absence of both parents, we might even begin to understand "sister" not only as a noun denoting a role, but as a verb (like "mother" and "father") describing a particular and unique form of relation driven by care. Under Koreeda's unobtrusive lens, which observes rather than instructs, through a sororal vivacity perhaps not even known to or directed by the director himself, female domesticity is not reified but utterly transformed.

The camerawork and blocking — like Ozu's, where even empty space is infinitely infused with meaning — corroborates this as well. The dining table lives at the heart of the house, and it is around this table that the lives of the sisters revolve, spin out, and return to. Before the three sisters leave to attend their father's funeral, there is an empty seat at the 4-sided table, which the camera occupies. The perspective is such that we are seated at the table, their little sister. Even after Suzu arrives and Chika's boyfriend joins them for lunch — five people at a table for four — the blocking maintains this openness, with a seat always left open for a potential guest. In this way, the sisters leave an open invitation, an ever-inviting seat at their table which someone (including the audience) might occupy. This is the conceit of the film's English title too: the "our" in Our Little Sister, refers not only to the sisters on the screen, but to us.

In my two years of separation from my sisters, I watched this film three times — once for each of us. In the film, the sisters make plum wine together. To mark the different batches, they stick and poke the characters for their names into the plums. These rituals bind them and impart the simple yet profound wisdom from their grandmother: "every living thing takes care." When my sisters and I were girls, we picked flowers on the hill we live on. "Flowers" that were really weeds and shrubs. Turning a deaf ear to berating grandmas, we'd strip in the garden for a bath in the sun under the garden hose, becoming flowers ourselves — squatting first then rising as the water drenched us, unfolding our arms to sway in the air, nourished by the simplest of things: water, sun, youth. The last time I saw my sisters before the pandemic broke, I got a tattoo of a bouquet of these wild weeds, unruly, ungoverned blooms. A yet unarticulated effort to collect the things I love — flowers, sisters — etching them onto my body, keeping them close as skin.

When Suzu is first invited to come live with the sisters, she remains quiet on the cusp of a major decision, her face inscrutable, before yipping simply "I'll come!" as the train door shuts.15 I felt I understood in Suzu's momentary reticence the confusion and acceptance of unyielding support — wholly unasked for, completely dependable, and therefore entirely enabling. The power of family — those we come from, those we choose, and those we make — is the security of a nourishing and permissive cocoon in which we can be free to be exactly as we are, and to know we are fully accepted exactly as we are. When I was younger, I wanted a little sister of my own. I can explain my impulse better today even as the wish has not only faded but become impossible: loving my sisters as I did made me want to have one more person to love. I am my sisters' sister, and Sachi's and Yoshino's and Chika's and Suzu's too. And they are mine.

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Jerrine Tan (@jerrinetanew) is currently assistant professor of English at City University Hong Kong. She received her BA from UC Berkeley and her MA and PhD in English from Brown University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in academic journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Wasafiri, and the Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro and on popular platforms such as Brooklyn Rail, Literary Hub, WIRED, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Asian American Writers' Workshop.

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