Banana Yoshimoto: The Premonition: heard on Audible

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Eccentric old house

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.

Japanese mountain volcano peak
Image by kimura2 from Pixabay

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!

Postcards from the Past

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Old postcards of Jamaica Bridge and Glasgow docks

As I pursued my research for my latest book, I accumulated quite a few postcards and other ephemera which might not, at first sight, appear to have had much to do with the subject in hand.  Indeed, when I decided to sort out my box file, I was initially a bit surprised just how much of this stuff I had acquired!  However, much of the work was done during the pandemic, when eBay was actually a very sensible way of getting hold of things … and you could argue (hark at me, justifying myself) that I spent less on those postcards than two or three hot drinks at the RCS café-bar each day I’m on site!

Did Mozart Allan use printers Aird & Coghill? They printed a lot of music in Glasgow!

Sifting through my treasure-trove was so enjoyable that I eventually realised I wasn’t in the least bit ashamed of my guilty secret.  I have a contemporary postcard of the very respectable-looking Glasgow street where James S. Kerr first lived.  (The neighbourhood is less upmarket now, and both his first home AND his shop are now gone.)  And there’s a postcard of the shop that Frank Simpson had on the corner of Sauchiehall Street before the shop and adjacent church were knocked down to make room for British Home Stores.  I also have a card of the view Mozart Allan would have seen every time he stepped outside his shop.  (HIS shop building is still standing, just along from the Courts, beside the River Clyde.) 

Pretty much the view from the shop doorstep!

I have pictures of the docks, as they were then, conveniently close for Kerr and Mozart Allan’s trading activities, and a picture of the boat on which Kerr’s successor sailed to America on one occasion.  I like to be able to imagine what a place was like when the person I’m writing about, actually lived there.

I’ve also got odd bits of commercial ephemera – an advertising brochure; a business postcard; a couple of letters.  The business postcard set me on the track of the individidual who took over Kerr’s business after Mrs Kerr died.  It was only last weekend, long after I’d acquired it, that I realised there was a woman’s name written across the top left corner.  A colloquial diminutive for the new owner’s wife’s first name, in fact.  So – maybe she worked in the shop, too?  It’s not musicological research, but I would like to find out.  I enjoy finding women working in the music publishing/retail business, in eras when fewer women worked outside the home.

Another bunch of postcards trace the tartan-mania which spilled over from cards to coffee-table song-books and miniature souvenir books.  Talking of souvenirs, I have travel guides, maps, an embroidery canvas of a commemorative map of the British Isles – it was unworked, but I’ve since done the stitching and had it framed – and a reproduction of an early PanAm poster.  I’ve written quite a bit about Scottish songs in the memory of expats, both overseas and over here.

And there are a few photos of children having music lessons; of women sitting at the piano; a magic lantern slide; a stereoscope of (apparently) happy workers on a cotton plantation – in my book, I’ve written about the racism in plantation songs.

A whole load of sol-fa booklets of various kinds.  They have a wee box of their own.

There’s also a photo of an Edinburgh railway bridge.  Why?  I was hunting down a particular song-book editor, and a musician with the right name lived just beside that bridge.  I don’t think it was the right man, but it’s a nice photo, so I’ve kept it anyway!