The Premonition

If you know me in person, have followed me for a bit, or know what I’ve been spending time writing about (homesickness), it will be no surprise why I adored The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto, published in 1988 in Japan and recently translated to English.

EXHIBIT A:

“I was gazing at the dull, discolored tile mosaic under the bare light bule. There in the steam, I 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.” (I’ve been asking people what homesickness “feels like,” and this is very on point.)

EXHIBIT B:

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

EXHIBIT C:

“All this made me feel unmoored, like I was up in the air.” (Matt can attest that when I talk about my writing/homesickness, the words “untethered” and “unmoored” come up quite frequently.)

EXHIBIT D:

“I’d never figured out why I got so lonely so easily. Sometimes when I was on my own at night, I’d be seized by an overwhelming sadness I could only call homesickness.” (Bingo.)

Banana Yoshimoto has a wonderful ability to write about amorphous place-based emotion. In fact, my favorite line of hers is from her novel The Lake — “the placeness of a place” — and I have a chapter that revolves around this very line. (Here’s a link to a blog post I wrote [almost 10 years ago?!] about this novel and this line. It’s a bit about moving — which cuts close since we just did that again — and a bit about an economic principle [?])

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originally published on instagram