- Short Japanese novels have become a thing now in the English speaking world. Over the last few years Emi Yagi's Diary of a Void, Mieko Kawakami's two novels All the Lovers in the Night and Heaven, and of course Toshikazu Kawaguchi's bestselling Before the Coffee Gets Cold series have really made their mark.
- Perhaps this is why Banana Yoshimoto's The Premonition, first published in Japan in 1988 has just been re-released in English by Faber. And I thank god for that. This is a Japanese classic, a fascinating, strange, and absorbing story, and exceptionally well translated by Asa Yoneda. And it's only 133 pages long so can be read in one sitting.
- A young girl, Yayoi, visits her aunt Yukino aged 30, who lives alone in a neglected, untidy house a short train trip from Tokyo. Yukino taught music at a private high school and has become quite an eccentric.
- Yayoi’s parents are upper middle class. Her dad’s a doctor, her mother a nurse. She loves her younger brother Tetsuo. They’ve just moved back into their renovated house and bought a dog. Tokyo's vibrancy with its trains, stations, bars, restaurants and parks is on show.
- So that's the setting - sort of normal people leading normal lives. Except, as it turns out, that's far from the case.
- The young girl dreams, and has visions of people that appear in a strange way to be familiar. She is very sensitive to the darkness, the stars, the wind, and the trees, as if nature has messages.
- One night her brother gets a phone call and leaves the house. Worried, she found him and walked home with him. The next night she herself runs away from home and goes to her aunt's house, where she stays for a long time.
- That's when she learns the truth about all sort of things, which of course I can't disclose.
- The young girl dreams, and has visions of people that appear in a strange way to be familiar. She is very sensitive to the darkness, the stars, the wind, and the trees, as if nature has messages.
- One night her brother gets a phone call and leaves the house. Worried, she found him and walked home with him. The next night she herself runs away from home and goes to her aunt's house, where she stays for a long time.
- That's when she learns the truth about all sort of things, which of course I can't disclose.
- The aunt becomes the central character from that point. …the dark feminine magic that was her nature…she harboured something vast, lost, and familiar, and it was like a siren call to those of us who were missing parts of our childhoods...She had the habit of looking away from things she feared, or found distasteful, or thought might hurt her.
- Also central to the story is Yayoi's and her brother Tetsuo's relationship.
- A wonderful reflection about how life's vicissitudes whack us however good as humans we are.
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