The Premonition

by Banana Yoshimoto

It was over now, but it had to be. In coming to an end, it had given me something, and only by making my way through was I able to begin to live the rest of my life.

What made her beautiful to me was more like a specific mood whose tendrils pervaded everything, from the way she moved to the way she passed her days to the fleeting expressions that passed across her face when something happened.

I heard my aunt play the piano. Its tone was soft, and just like I remembered it. At the kitchen window one overcast afternoon, I watched its beautiful music as it flowed from her room upstairs, threaded through the trees in the garden, and slipped away into the gray sky.

I had a premonition of setting out on a journey and getting lost inside a distant tide as the sun went down, ending up far, far away from where I started.

Dad protected us with a strong heart full of nothing but devotion.

on nights when the moon shone especially bright, things often felt unbearable. I’d look up to the distant sky and feel the air blowing past me, and sense that I was on the verge of recalling something overwhelmingly familiar.

hearing his care for me, I suddenly felt very happy. It was a funny kind of happiness, a little sly, and maybe the sweeter for it. I didn’t want to say anything so he’d never stop trying to make me feel better.

That feeling—I think it’s one everyone knows. It goes something like this. A sudden rustling in your chest. A premonition of understanding. You feel you might be on the verge of uncovering something . . . You’re a little fearful, oddly excited, and somehow forlorn . . . Like there’s something coming around the next corner that’s going to turn everything you know about yourself on its head.

That day, that Sunday, my family was all there at home, doing our own things. It was a gentle, ordinary day. But a huge tide was already incoming. As much as I cherished its peacefulness, a handful of images crossed my vision that day that I was unable to deny. I could only watch in astonishment while they unspooled in a stream like an old 8 mm film clattering into motion, distant and yet treasured, filling my heart up with pain and longing.

I guess you need to have a home before you can run away from it, I thought, and I felt it in my heart.

His voice carried through the darkness and seemed to light a shining path through the night sky. Just his tone was enough to reassure me. It’s because he loves me, I thought. And I love him, too. Simple.

“Don’t you think nights are so pretty, Tetsuo?” And instead of rolling his eyes, he said, “It’s because the air’s always clearer at night.” Then he took the roll of tape and left the room. His words slowly settled into my heart, leaving a sweet resonance behind them.

It was the loneliness of having a corner of your heart that was waiting for someone.

Out of nowhere, Tetsuo said, “Yayoi, isn’t the night even more beautiful tonight? Like the lights and stuff. Don’t you think there’s something different about them?” That was exactly what I’d been thinking while we walked. The night sky was truly black, and the open air reflected the town like a polished mirror. “I think you’re right,” I remember saying. “It must be because the air’s extra clear tonight.”

There was always something melancholy about late-night phone calls. And discovering the truth always hurt. I eavesdropped from the border between dreaming and waking, feeling like a child.

“Do you usually drink this much even when you’re alone?” I asked. “Yep,” she said.

A woman with eyes that can see straight into your heart.

For some time after that, she gazed out the window with a faraway look, like she was reeling in the beautiful strands she would need for the old stories she was preparing to weave for me.

She’s a princess asleep in an old castle where time’s stopped, clinging to dreams of a lost dynasty, I thought. She was the only one left who knew its glory, and her heart belonged to it.

It was a perfect smile that contained everything that existed in the world, like a lake brimming with cold, clear water. I felt forgiven.

“We were an unusual family, maybe, but we were happy. As happy as a dream.

Days that were endless, but which you could only take one at a time, with no sense of what was coming tomorrow . . . I still can’t shake it. It lives inside me like a curse or a blessing.”

For the first time in a while I had the sensation of being gently comforted, as if I were sitting in a patch of sunlight and watching the sun drift between distant clouds.

Then, as I dozed, I heard the sound of the piano. It rang out so beautifully that I found myself crying hot tears. Its melody filled up my dream, over and over, before disappearing with a sparkle somewhere deep inside my chest.

He looked like a slumbering god.

Right then, it came to me. I was sure my aunt had stood exactly where I was standing just recently—around the time of evening when the navy-blue sky, which the sun had almost departed, had backlit the profiles of the trees in intriguing mosaics. She stood here alone without the lights on, gazing out the window. I could feel it as clearly as though I held it in my hand.

Dearest Yayoi, I can’t believe you came. How nice of you! Distance really does make our hearts grow fonder. Yukino

The moods of our hearts, the tone of the wind, the number of stars blinking in the sky, the measure of our melancholy, the tiredness in our limbs—all of these were in perfect balance, as though by a miracle.

But the dark feminine magic that was her nature. Behind her hair, her sweet ringing voice, her long fingers on the piano, she harbored something vast, lost, and familiar, and it was like a siren call to those of us who were missing parts of our childhoods. It was something deeper than night, longer than eternity, out of reach.

The more beautiful a night away from home was, the more regretful it made you feel.

I looked up at the sky, trying to get a grip on my own existence before it vanished into the darkness.

As a child, I’d always been reduced to a kind of grief by the idea that each one of the bright shining dots that the sky seemed to brim with was an entire star. That the lights of billions of stars were contained in the spaces between the tree branches I looked up through.

“When people see too many of something, it just makes them feel sad. No one knows why.”

I felt distant, in every dimension, from where hearts beat and blood flowed, from things like life and death, and home and family . . . and love,

He smelled of home. Of the house where I grew up; its beams, its clothes, its furnishings. And instead of confusing me, it filled me with so much longing that I thought I might cry. So, instead, I raised my head and looked into his diamond eyes. They were shining so sorrowfully that I had to close my eyes. Our lips met. It was a kiss that seemed to last as long as eternity.

Still, my heart pulsed with a somber longing. It was a sweet-tasting darkness.

But I felt as bereft as if I were face-to-face with the absolute darkness of the universe. There was nowhere for us to go, no tomorrow where we could be together.

It’s kind of tragic, I thought, how we can never completely escape our childhoods.

Love wasn’t like anything else—it was a creature with a mind of its own. There was no stopping it now.

I’d never known a love before that could blot out the world around it like this.

We were in love, but he smiled at me again, looking like my brother. It felt almost intolerably bittersweet.

I could feel the satisfaction of a sweet, painful consummation flowing quietly along the bottom of my heart.

“Hello?” It was Mom. All of a sudden, I felt like bursting into tears. Her voice soaked into my tired head, beyond reason or circumstance.

I was tearful for no reason, and everyone was so kind. There, in the midst of a beautiful evening, my heart must have been full of that premonition. Because that was the last day our family ever spent in that neighborhood where we’d had such a blissful, happy life.

It was a lonely sight. There was almost something holy about it.

But she was here, by my side, offering up a quiet prayer toward this beautiful sight, just like me. “It’s been so long,” she said, softly. It’s finally over, I thought. My heart felt like it had been washed clean.

I’d discovered my sister, and my sweetheart.

Darkness overtook the sky like a slow velvet curtain falling, and the stars started to twinkle; first one, then another, and another.