THE PREMONITION

A young woman’s relationship with her eccentric aunt leads her to startling revelations about her life and her past.

Nineteen-year-old Yayoi is haunted by an inability to remember her past. She has an uncanny sense of the future, however: She can often sense who will be on the phone when it begins ringing. After an odd vision in her family’s bathroom, she becomes unsettled enough to leave home, landing on the doorstep of her young aunt, Yukino. Yukino is only about 11 years Yayoi’s senior, but she has already settled into a “spinster” persona, living alone in a large, cluttered house and teaching music at a local high school. When Yayoi begins to press Yukino for answers to questions she has about her blurry past, the pieces of Yayoi’s past—and future—begin to fall into place. This short novel was first published in Japan in 1988, but its floaty interiority feels timeless. (Even Yukino’s obsession with the Friday the 13th films still feels plausible.) In some ways, this is an archetypal coming-of-age story about being young and needing to leave home in order to gain clarity, but both the style and the plot particulars (including a slightly off-kilter love story subplot) set it apart. Translator Yoneda elegantly renders Yoshimoto’s synesthetic descriptions and atmospheric settings, which range from Tokyo to numerous rural locales. Yoshimoto has become a happier writer—or at least more interested in writing happy characters—as her career has unfolded. But this melancholy bildungsroman acknowledges the way that leaving behind adolescence can evoke the bittersweet sensation of waking up from a strange and vivid dream. “Only by coming through it,” Yayoi thinks of her visit to Yukino, “could I get to living the rest of my life.”

Worth the 35-year wait for Yoshimoto’s Anglophone fans.