The Premonition

by Banana Yoshimoto

In retrospect, I can see how special a moment it was—one that had been a long time coming, and would never come again.

I grieve for the clarity of that time I had

how lucky I was to share that space with her during a sliver of time that had appeared only by sheer chance. It was over now, but it had to be. In coming to an end, it had given me something,

was still too young to understand much about death, but I was saddened by her grief.

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. It was the beginning of summer, and I was nineteen years old.

Waiting to find out what she was about to say, I felt like I was disappearing into the silent background of our family’s history.

suddenly felt like I might be on the verge of remembering. 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.

once your spirit no longer had the freedom of being a kid,

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

There’s no coming back to what I have now, not this time. Leaving now means setting something big into motion.

And more convincingly, something deep in my heart shone its light of truth. This kind of knowing was never wrong . . . even when I wished it could be.

But each time I reached the verge of remembering something, I felt vulnerable. Like a traveler far from home, I lost touch with the security of feeling that I could stay right where I was.

but until I found out, I wanted to spend as long as I could incubating the faint echoes of memory that were coming to me, piece by piece.

She’s a princess asleep in an old castle where time’s stopped, clinging to dreams of a lost dynasty, I thought.

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.”

I noticed that the affection I felt for him now had the same quality as the affection I had for the past. And we were different now. We were boy and girl, two strangers harboring budding feelings for each other.

I’d live quietly for a while, not letting on what I knew,

But my mind was no longer clamoring for my attention. No matter how the wind rattled at the window or how swiftly the scenery flew past, even if an enigmatic night lay in wait all through the quiet carriage, I’d never again be driven by the overwhelming sense that there was something I needed to recall. I was fulfilled by the knowledge and the comfort of having found myself. Someday, somewhere up ahead, tonight would only be another scene from a long-ago dream.

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. Under the summer constellations, we walked and walked.

was as sure of it as I was of anything in this world, and there was nothing I wasn’t ready to give up in return. 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. Just now, at the bottom of a night so clear, the two of us were feeling the same way, but it might all melt away like a dusting of snow when the sun came up.

But our destinies had already diverged, and each of us had grown to adulthood by our own way. We couldn’t go back. I tried to dismiss the feeling, telling myself it was junk—pure nostalgia, and disrespectful to both of our realities.

This is my father, I thought to myself. His handwriting. Marks he left that prove he was really here.

Maybe this time, and every time, I did nothing but bring her pain.

The foreknowing was very much like that autumn sunset. It was as though the angled rays of the sun were illuminating things lying deep within my chest.

There, in the midst of a beautiful evening, my heart must have been full of that premonition.

But she was here, by my side, offering up a quiet prayer toward this beautiful sight, just like me.

I was going home. Nothing about the real issue had been resolved; in fact, I knew there were only more challenges waiting up ahead. Each one would need to be overcome, by me, but also by Tetsuo. And they’d be difficult, perhaps nearly insurmountable. But there was still nowhere else for me to call home; I’d seen for myself how fate worked. And yet nothing had been taken away, only given.

Looking out over the dark lake, almost as if we were hoping to catch a glimpse of our lost family drifting somewhere across it, Yukino and I stood there together in silence for a little while longer.