Banana Yoshimoto

The internationally beloved author of Kitchen and Dead-End Memories returns with a beautiful and heartfelt story of a young woman haunted by her childhood and the inescapable bitterness that inevitably comes from knowing the truth Yayoi, a nineteen-year-old woman from a seemingly loving middle-class family, has lately been haunted by the feeling that she has forgotten something important from her childhood. Her premonition grows stronger day by day and, as if led by it, she decides to move in with her mysterious aunt, Yukino. No one understands her aunt’s unusual lifestyle. For as long as Yayoi can remember, Yukino has lived alone in an old gloomy single-family home, quietly, almost as though asleep. When she is not working, Yukino spends all day in her pajamas, clipping her nails and trimming her split ends. She eats only when she feels like it, and she often falls asleep lying on her side in the hallway. She sometimes wakes Yayoi at two in the morning to be her drinking companion, sometimes serves flan in a huge mixing bowl for dinner, and watches Friday the 13th over and over to comfort herself. A study desk, old stuffed animals––things Yukino wants to forget––are piled up in her backyard like a graveyard of her memories. An instant bestseller in Japan when first published in 1988, The Premonition is finally available for the first time in English, translated by the celebrated Asa Yoneda.

A Novel

The Premonition

哀しい予感

Elisa

I grieve for the clarity of that time I had with my aunt- how lucky I was to share that space with her during a sliver of time that had appeared only by sheer chance. It was over now, but it had to be. In coming to an end, it had given me something, and only by making my way through was I able to begin to live the rest of my life.

The reason these things still came across as somehow being virtues, I thought, was because my aunt was beautiful. She had pretty features, but in that sense, there were plenty of people more attractive than her. What made her beautiful to me was more like a specific mood whose tendrils pervaded everything, from the way she moved to the way she passed her days to the fleeting expressions that passed across her face when some- thing happened. The feeling was so stubbornly consistent that it seemed unshakable, like something that would continue, untouched, all the way until the end of the world. It made her seem strangely beautiful no matter what she was doing. The vacant yet bright light she gave off filled the space around her. When she lowered her long eyelashes and rubbed her eyes sleepily, she was as dazzling to me as an angel, and when she sat on the floor with her legs sprawled carelessly in front of her, her slender ankles were as smooth and neat as a marble sculpture's. 

joana ashley

"Take the whole pot, with the umbrella and all, and throw it out in the yard. Then just stay inside for the day. It's raining, after all," she said, and retreated back under the covers. 

I gave up and took the heavy pot around to the back of the house like I'd been told. Striding through wet weeds that came up to my knees, I saw the back of the ramshackle house for the first time. It was in total disrepair. On top of that, the yard was full of a hair-raisingly large pile of things that my aunt had previously decided to forget, abandoned to the rain. It was hard to even fathom how long she had been throwing things away there. All manner of things she had haphazardly tossed onto the pile so she could avoid having to look at or think about them ever again-

I felt like we were talking about something very unhappy. Every word that came out of my mouth seemed as white and cold as the stones on the shore of the mythical Sanzu River which led to the afterlife. I felt distant, in every dimension, from where hearts beat and blood flowed, from things like life and death, and home and family... and love... 

Love wasn't like anything else - it was a creature with a mind of its own. There was no stopping it now. 

The Premonition quotes

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