Clairvoyance

I’m still new-fangled with this Audible book app. It told me I had a monthly credit to spend, so I had a look at the recommendations. Yoshimoto’s The Premonition sounded intriguing, from the blurb – and the cover art was attractive; proof that book design matters!

Had I walked into a bookshop and seen it, would I have bought it? I don’t know. I’d have been surrounded by appealing new titles, and I can’t say whether I’d have chosen this above all others. It’s quite short, compared to the other books I’ve listened to, and – frustratingly – it is not broken up into chapters. I find it easier to put a book down if I’ve come to a structural break.

It’s a strange, dreamlike book, set in or around Tokyo. It’s richly descriptive of its physical surroundings, but I got a bit tired of reading about Yayoi’s brother’s straight back, the set of his shoulders and the way he walked!

Yayoi, the heroine is paradoxically both clairvoyant after a fashion (the word ‘clairvoyant’ isn’t used, but what is a clairvoyant if not someone who has premonitions?) and amnesiac, having lost all childhood memories after a traumatic incident. She knows that there’s something she doesn’t know. She has two loving parents; a wonderful brother a couple of years younger than her, whom she adores; and a completely eccentric young aunt who lives alone in a ramshackle house, from which she somehow emerges sane and tidy enough to work as a school music teacher every day … except when it rains.

We never find out quite why the house has been allowed to become so dirty and run-down (was there no-one to help her learn how to run a home?); why the aunt never seems to cook proper meals; or why she seems so dreamy and other-wordly. It takes a while to work out why the heroine feels so drawn to her.

There are loose ends. What was the significance of the heroine intuiting that someone had killed a baby in the leaky bath of the temporary accomodation that her own family rented during a house renovation? This seems to be completely unrelated to anything else in the story. And why did the aunt not like going out in the rain? Most particularly, once the heroine had worked out her real relationships to her brother and aunt, you’re left wondering why she hadn’t been told before.

At the end of the novel, Yayoi has pieced together the story, with the help of her aunt/sister. But what will become of the changed relationship with her brother? And how will the aunt/sister resume a romantic relationship with another young man, who had until recently been a classroom pupil? From a British vantage-point, all I could think about was child protection policies, ethical breaches and the involvement of social services, the teaching council and potentially the police. My knowledge of Japanese culture is so minimal that I don’t know if such a situation would be viewed differently there.

Discovering the truth may not make things any easier

So, if I had to summarise the book in one line, it would be this:- ‘Discovering the truth may not make things any easier.’

I’m not sure what I’ll read next, but perhaps I’ll opt for something a little more conventional!