I am always reading women in translation, but I do long August where the bookish community collectively highlights the stories and voices of women in translation.
While in the city a few weeks ago, I grabbed a beautiful hardcover of Banana Yoshimoto's 1988 novella The Premonition- translated by celebrated Asa Yoneda. I love her writing, and I can see sitting to read this on a long and slow morning with lots of coffee at hand.
The internationally beloved author of Kitchen and Dead-End Memories returns with a beautiful and heartfelt story of a young woman haunted by her childhood and the inescapable bitterness that inevitably comes from knowing the truth.
Yayoi, a nineteen-year-old woman from a seemingly loving middle-class family, has lately been haunted by the feeling that she has forgotten something important from her childhood. Her premonition grows stronger day by day and, as if led by it, she decides to move in with her mysterious aunt, Yukino.
No one understands her aunt's unusual lifestyle. For as long as Yayoi can remember, Yukino has lived alone in an old gloomy single-family home, quietly, almost as though asleep. When she is not working, Yukino spends all day in her pajamas, clipping her nails and trimming her split ends. She eats only when she feels like it, and she often falls asleep lying on her side in the hallway. She sometimes wakes Yayoi at two in the morning to be her drinking companion, sometimes serves flan in a huge mixing bowl for dinner, and watches Friday the 13th over and over to comfort herself. A study desk, old stuffed animals--things Yukino wants to forget--are piled up in her backyard like a graveyard of her memories.
An instant bestseller in Japan when first published in 1988, The Premonition is finally available for the first time in English, translated by the celebrated Asa Yoneda.
Eight African Women to Read for WIT Month
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| source: center for the art of translation |
A few translated books that I've loved
