The Premonition
Yayoi is 19, the older daughter in a happy middle-class Tokyo family, and yet she cannot shake the sense that she has forgotten something central about her own past. She moves out of her family's house and into the half-abandoned home of her aunt Yukino, a withdrawn high-school music teacher who lives among a piano, a few records, and very little else. Across one slow autumn, Yayoi and Yukino circle a buried family memory neither of them wants to speak first, and Yoshimoto writes the entire 150-page novel in the same elliptical hush she brought to Kitchen forty years ago. The book is a chamber piece on memory, family, and the gentlest kind of haunting.
Where The Premonition keeps showing up
One of our editors' lists features this novel.
What you might want to know about The Premonition
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A 19-year-old Tokyo woman moves in with her reclusive aunt and circles a buried family memory in this 2023 English translation of a quiet Yoshimoto chamber piece.
Multiple novels share this title. Banana Yoshimoto wrote a Japanese novel by that title (1988). The most-searched recent book is The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis (2021), nonfiction about U.S. pandemic preparedness.
Yes. The Premonition is Michael Lewis's nonfiction account of the small group of public-health figures who tried to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic and were ignored. The book is based on extensive interviews.
The Premonition is a standalone novel by Banana Yoshimoto, not part of a series.
The Premonition is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.