Template:Character infobox Yuko Nishikiyama (錦山 優子, Nishikiyama Yūko) is Akira Nishikiyama's younger sister.
Background
Yuko was, alongside her brother, Kazuma Kiryu, and Yumi Sawamura, raised at Shintaro Kazama's Sunflower Orphanage. She suffered from an unnamed illness involving her heart, which had her going to the hospital periodically.
Like a Dragon: Prologue
Yakuza/Yakuza Kiwami
In 1995, anticipating her final surgery, Yuko's reliance on her elder brother is the reason Kiryu decides to take the fall for Sohei Dojima's murder. After the final surgery is a failure, the doctor tells Nishiki that he can try getting a new heart on the black market, but that it will cost him 30 million yen. Nishiki tells his family captain that he can do anything to get hold of the money. Once he does however, it turns out that the doctor was a fraud, and has run off. Yuko then dies shortly after in 1996. This, alongside Yumi's disappearance and his own feelings of inferiority, trigger Nishiki's descent into darkness. As he sits in front of her shrine in his office, he grabs a tanto knife and holds it towards his own stomach, when his family captain comes in. Annoyed that he appears to be ignoring him, the man starts getting angry, ranting about how Kiryu would have been better as patriarch. This enrages Nishiki, who stabs him to death instead.