Board the bullet train for a gorgeous and weird Japanese story
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To remember you’ve forgotten something is usually a temporary annoyance. For Yayoi, the 19-year-old protagonist of The Premonition, it’s a perennial condition. Despite her model family, Yayoi recalls nothing of her childhood and is haunted by the sense that she knows, but has forgotten, why. On the intuition that her eccentric aunt Yukino holds a key to the mystery, Yayoi runs away from her parents’ trim Tokyo home to live at Yukino’s tumbledown place, where the dust lies thick, caramel flan is a meal, and even time seems to move differently.
The Premonition is, thanks to translator Asa Yoneda, the 12th novel by Japanese writer Banana Yoshimoto to reach English. Yayoi is our narrator, and she’s reflecting, from something like the present day, on the importance of that long-past spell at her aunt’s home, where – out of the chaos – she achieved a clarity that (she says) enabled her “to begin to live the rest of my life”.
Since achieving breakout success in 1988 with her debut novel, Kitchen, Yoshimoto’s stories have played with extended families, networks of relation that tangle blood and kin. Children are born out of wedlock, adopted and orphaned; romantic competitors share a lesbian frisson; siblings fall in love.
The Premonition is no different. As the days at Yukino’s house merge, Yayoi becomes convinced she knows the reason for the lacuna. Yet when Yukino confirms her suspicions, Yayoi’s exhilaration proves short-lived: the long-sought revelation only raises knottier questions. That dawn, Yukino disappears, setting Yayoi and her younger brother Tetsuo on a quest to find her, which takes them from Tokyo to the mountains of Karuizawa and the northernmost tip of Japan’s main island, Honshu. In the course of these journeys, they begin to find their way in a present newly complicated by the unravelling of secrets long-kept.
As in Yoshimoto’s other books, it’s the aftermath of the ruptures experienced by the characters that plays out over the course of the story. Her novels rely less on the vicissitudes of plot than profound shifts deep within her characters: what unfolds isn’t so much a series of suspenseful events as a growing understanding of human lives. For all the high-speed trains that Yayoi, Tetsuo and Yukino ride, The Premonition is, explicitly, a journey of self-discovery that traces the past in order to move into the future.
Understatement makes Yoshimoto’s writing distinct. In her hands, webs of loyalty and affection flourish as oases of safety. Small acts of ordinary kindness – a blanket over a sleeping niece, a deft reply defusing a tense conversation, a hug that smells of home – become luminous expressions of love. All this could have been sentimental, except for the uncanniness threaded through her writing. Many of the characters in her other books appear to have supernatural abilities. In The Lake, a bed-bound seer speaks wordlessly though her brother; in Kitchen, two friends meet in a shared dream; in Love Songs, a medium offers an anteroom where the living and dead might converse.
Here in The Premonition, Yayoi experiences visions that spool past her eyes like 8mm home movies, plunging her into “a place wholly set apart from the real world”. Some, like the dream of a baby’s murder, are disturbing. Others, like the scene of a young girl observing storm clouds from the edge of a green lake, fill her with longing. They sear her eyes and seem to pass too quickly, “as if” – she observes – “I were watching my favourite landscapes on earth through the windows of a speeding car”. Are these remnants of the past that will dissipate once seen? Or reminders of how things were – or how they could have been?
The Premonition culminates on Mount Osore, the gates to the underworld, where the world of the living and the dead converge, separated only by the mythical Sanzu river. Amid this barren, contradictory landscape, Yoshimoto suggests a space of wonder in which to appreciate what binds us together and holds us apart, in this world and the next. At 130-odd pages, and with its gentle pace and relaxed first-person narration, The Premonition may not appear substantial, but it yields to patient, generous reading. And for those unfamiliar with Yoshimoto’s work, it’s a timely invitation to explore her unusual, alluring world.
The Premonition (tr Asa Yoneda) is published by Faber at £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
