The Premonition: A Novel

Banana Yoshimoto

Οκτ 2023 · Catapult

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Longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize

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 19-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 2:00 a.m 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 child 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 in English, translated by the celebrated Asa Yoneda.

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BANANA YOSHIMOTO is the author of the international bestseller Kitchen. She has published ten books in English translation, including Goodbye Tsugumi, Moshi Moshi, and most recently, Dead-End Memories. Her work has been translated and published in more than thirty countries. In Italy, she won the Scanno Literary Prize in 1993, the Fendissime Literary Prize in 1996, the Maschera d’Argento Prize in 1999, and the Capri Award in 2011. She lives in Tokyo.

ASA YONEDA is the translator of Banana Yoshimoto's Dead-End Memories and Moshi Moshi, as well as Idol, Burning by Rin Usami and The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya.