The Premonition: Banana Yoshimoto

Originally published in Japanese in 1988, the English translation only made its way to readers in 2023.Much like her landmark novel, “Kitchen”, in “Premonition”, Yoshimoto examines the notion of home, and what it means to be kin.Yayoi is a teenager who, by all accounts, live with a loving family, but she is somehow irresistibly drawn to her bohemian aunt outside of her nuclear unit. The reader quickly gets a sense that something lurks beneath this affiliation with someone whom she was not even particularly close to when Yayoi, who is puzzled by her own feelings, runs away with her duffel bag to her aunt’s ramshackle house periodically, as if to escape her own loving home. She reasons that “l guess you need to have a home before you can run away from it”.Yayoi’s memories of her early childhood are spotty at best, but she has moments when she “suddenly felt like [she] might be on the verge of remembering.”she surmises: “That feeling - I think it’s one everyone knows. It goes something like this. A sudden rustling in your chest. A premonition of understanding.”As Yayoi goes on a journey of self-discovery and uncovering her memories, her relationships with her immediate family, in particular her brother Tetsuo, with whom she has a close bond with, undergo irreversible changes.Although this is only the second Yoshimoto book I’ve read, not counting the novella “Moonlight Shadow”, there is something irresistible about her writing that draws me. As observed of “Kitchen”, it could be the way she weaves in the weather conditions along with the characters’ feelings and the events that unfold that provides a certain sensory element in her prose that elevates the reader’s experience of the story. How the sky looks, the unfurling of the clouds, the patter of rain on the window, the rush of a breeze turning into an outright storm; they infuse the reader’s senses in a moment, making them feel even more fully invested in it.Four-and-a-half stars.

Spoiler alert!This book is either terrible, or the translation is poor. Or maybe a bit of both. Too Americanised. Characters not believable. Incidents in the story not believable. Too many references to incest & paedophilia with characters falling for siblings they have grown up with. I know it happens in real life, but the way it happens in this book is just too sudden, out of the blue and implausible. Would not recommend.

I have enjoyed many contemporary Japanese novels, especially those in the Iki-gai genre. I read this one quickly, but kept thinking to myself 'oh yes?' and 'that is very unlikely'. the plot is simple, but the language is even more so, hence the slight sense of disbelief.On the whole I'd say it is probably not worth the time.

When I read this book, I thought it was relatively recent. I only realised after finishing it that it was written in 1988. Yoshimoto has this talent for making her novels feel both timeless and contemporary. The writing style is fairly similar to "Kitchen" and "Moonlight Shadow". It's more raw, organic and even spontaneous than her later, more polished, works.Although some reviewers have been harsh, I found little in this novel to actually dislike. Incongruity, displacement, alienation and unconventional relationships are common themes of her works -- as is her light-touch approach in discussing them. At times, there were moments in this book that did leave me baffled, although they later on made more sense. For example, the scene in which Yayoi was in the bath and thought that something was touching her, which turned out to be a phantom rubber ducky -- and she thought she saw a woman. It's revealed that she had, at one point, had the ability to see ghosts. It was also revealed that early childhood memories of her birth family were breaking through the surface. Although this scene makes sense in either context, it's never actually revealed which option was correct.The relationships between the characters might be unconventional, but they're organic. Tetsuo had known for some time that Yayoi was adopted and allowed his feelings for her to blossom, hence the unusually warm sibling relationship. Yayoi's aunt, who was really her sister, lived the feral life she had lived growing up. She did things as she saw fit, not as society expected of her. Although morally questionably, her relationship with a student and his eventual inclusion in the plot did not feel forced and the relatively modest gap in ages made it a bit more palatable.

I have read and appreciated Banana Yoshimoto's work since I picked up an English translation of Kitchen in 1993. The Premonition is a mess! Very little cohesive narrative, and main characters which are repulsive and criminal - a female high school teacher who has a sexual relationship with a student (and aborts their baby), and a very young woman who has a borderline incestuous relationship with the boy she is raised to believe is her younger brother (still in high school) but later finds out is not related by blood. I really did not understand the purpose of these relationships in the story. And there's not enough skilled reflection or beauty in the rest of the story to balance out the darkness. I persisted with the book because it's Yoshimoto, and I wish I hadn't. Zero stars! It was first published in 1988, so maybe it's an early, immature, clumsy text that's been re-packaged ... save your $ and your respect for a usually interesting author.