More life, more invention
“I’d look up to the distant sky and feel the air blowing past me, and sense that I was on the verge of recalling something overwhelmingly familiar.” (The Premonition, Banana Yoshimoto)
I just finished The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto. Written almost forty years ago, Yoshimoto takes the reader on a haunting journey of a young woman who uncovers both the desire and truth of her family. The world of the novel orbits Yayoi, the protagonist, and her constant bumping into hauntings of a past that only has a vague outline in the present. These hauntings, or premonitions as she describes them, compels her throughout her life and ultimately sets her on a path that unravels what we know of truth and stitches together a new future for her and her family. Yoshimoto drops us into a world already in motion and we follow Yayoi across Japan searching for her aunt, the meaning of their relationship, and in many ways, permission to reconfigure her own life. I read Asa Yoneda’s English translation from the original Japanese and I always think translations require a certain commitment on the part of the reader; to language, its meanings and incomprehensibility. There are things that exist in one language that may not in another and as a reader you are gifted with this text that is a kind of approximation.
This is not a review though I do recommend picking up the novel. (it’s a quick 133 pages and well worth it I believe) I’ve been thinking about The Premonition though because I was struck by the voice. There are certain relationship dynamics in the novel that can be unsettling in many ways, particularly around age, but I found myself needing to finish it. Yayoi is such a full character, her mind so developed and generous in how she shares her impressions of the world around her. We are with her as she wrestles with the truth of her aunt and what that means in micro and macro scales. By the novel’s conclusion we witness, with a level of pride, the impact of Yayoi’s journey and are hopeful for her future. Her return home is dense with emotion and the reunion is both satisfying and natural. The lack of fanfare throughout the novel gives a level of slice-of-life sensibility that makes us feel as if we either are Yayoi or we know someone like her.
This was my first work by Yoshimoto (I’ve already picked up the short story collection Dead-End Memories) but her ability to compel both her characters and the reader is something I want to capture in my own writing. This post marks the first place I’ve said, not in person, that I am writing a novel. It’s a coming of age story that follows a protagonist’s journey after the sudden death of one of the matriarchs of their family. The narrator's childhood becomes the landscape for the things that continue to shape a family attempting to recover from hauntings that began long before the narrator was born. At the center is the question of what it means to live when you are both unrecognized and unremoved as a doorway into how a family grieves, loves, and imagines what is possible for their future in America. Who does one become when freedom feels like it is anywhere else but home?
In some ways it feels strange to be working on a novel, after all I have been primarily a poet and a one who has a tendency toward short poems at that. To be in process on what will be more than one hundred pages of a single story is almost incomprehensible to me. Yet, I find myself compelled, almost obsessively, with bringing what is in my brain onto the page.
Recently I was in a writers workshop (if I’m going to write a novel I wanted to really commit to writing as a craft) and we had been tasked with writing a short creative non-fiction piece about home. I wrote about returning home to Philadelphia after many years and coming back to the river for the first time since the succession of deaths in my family. When it was my turn, someone wanted me to read aloud the section of the essay where I said my mother was dead. This person had already decided how I would feel about this; Both the act of reading this fact aloud and the death itself. “I see her walking with you in this” she said with a gentle smile and I was uncertain what to do with her earnestness.
We were discussing the way language moves and the different ways we can layer and compound emotion in our work. Sympathy has a way of co-opting experience even under the pretense of caring. Another person in the workshop, who I would come to really enjoy (and also wished to become my friend) described the essay as having “an alongsideness with death” which I took to mean a kind of lingering. Truthfully, much of my creative work seems to live within an atmosphere of grief. So much so that I’ve become self conscious of being a cliché or worse, having people’s engagement with my work be always through a filter of pity.
I was reminded of that day in workshop because following Yayoi’s hauntings, the premonitions that drive her toward the future, felt like an invitation to write a different story. This is perhaps why I've been so drawn to the novel; that it is, however biographical, ultimately a fiction and there lies a crack of freedom. My novel is semi-autobiographical certainly, but pointedly, it is more an emotional truth of my life than it is an actual record of events. The novel has a universe unto itself that may mirror a reality I know but is decidedly not the same reality. This protagonist has a life of their own which allows me to no longer be so tethered to this world or its discomfort with death or its assumptions about familial love and relationships. Fiction has allowed me to develop a voice other than my own which has, for decades, felt forced to manage other people’s feelings about the deaths of my family rather than tell the truth.
The novel is certainly in process but it has been a gift in itself. If for no one other than me. I began this post with a line from The Premonition when Yayoi is describing a type of recall that is uncanny and consuming; bordering the line between memory, intuition, and desire. I find myself thinking of this as I write this novel that is an invention but also a kind of familiarity. And maybe it is there that I have been running toward; That well of emotion that when you dig deep enough we can see when reality spills into fantasy and back again.
So, I’m writing a book. Saying it here, out loud makes it material in some way (though the word count may beg to differ)
Writing remains one of, if not my only way of interfacing with the world. It is, perhaps selfish, but writing is always an attempt to invent connections I struggle to have. I spend much of my waking days filtering the processes of the world through my brain that does not flow in the natural currents around me. Writing is a buoying act; something that can tether me to existence. It has been through writing that the world becomes tangible and possible to me.
My mission in writing than is this. To create stories that make the world feel more real, even if that world has yet to come. The inventive, radical, at times infuriating nature of writing carries with it all the potential we need to do something. To move, to take action. And perhaps that is all we need. A reminder that there are things to do.
Keeping in the interest of reveals, below is an excerpt of the novel-in-progress. As always, thank you for being here.
I can still see it. The eight steps from the curb to the creaking front screen door. The light cutting through the dimly lit front room before being absorbed by the heavy brown sofa. The dust settled along the edges of the doorways. Containers of oxygen in the corner near the bulging block TV. Everywhere full. Each evening when I left I would carry bits of that house with me. Paperclips, hair ties, books that I snuck back into our house in my backpack. We are all covered in its residue somehow, whether we knew it or not.
Even though she was the oldest Aunt Lili had never worked as long as I knew her. Ma said she waited tables once upon a time but by the time I was born she had been tethered to this house. She mostly moved between the front room and the porch, her oxygen tank in her stead. She’d gaze out onto the street humming to herself. Whenever I rounded the corner after school and rushed up the stairs to the porch she’d smile and wave me inside. We’d spend hours watching her stories she had taped, melodramatic soap operas that she would silently move her lips to in time.
And I would sit and watch her. Follow the rhythm of her lips, the pace of her inhales and exhales. In the early days she would tell me when to retrieve a tank from the corner and mime with her hands how to feed the tubes back through her nostrils, around her head and down into the new container. Soon enough I could tell the difference between a low tank and an unseen twist in a tube. What was a swallowed yawn and what was a countdown.
Aunt Lili carried herself in a way that appeared unconcerned with how the world might see her. In fact, she did whatever she pleased. She had half-done crosswords and small books in various piles strewn about everywhere. On what had once been a dining table now laid a river of newspaper clippings and magazines with ads of creams and pin-up models. She spoke to herself out loud regardless of who was around and whatever interested her she’d pursue whole-heartedly. And all this came across beautiful somehow, I thought. Maybe because she was simply herself in that way people are when they are used to everyone watching them. She seemed to always know what everyone needed and that was almost always simply to be. She was honest and somehow gave everyone around her permission to be the same.
Aunt Lili and I rarely spoke to one another, instead we inhabited each other’s bodies in a type of mind-reading. Her eyes became my tongue; her breath, my voice.
When Ma arrived one night after her shift Aunt Lili glanced toward the door and cocked her head slightly.
“The hospital called,” I said, gathering my notebooks spread across the floor.
“And?” My mother asked still waiting near the doorway. I began refilling my backpack on the arm rest.
“Breath has been a little short and generally tired but,” I gave a small smile to my aunt still sunken into the sofa. “Ok for now.” She reached over to close the zipper on the front pocket of my bag, returning my smile.
“Now don’t you start” Aunt Lili said turning back to face her sister still standing by the door. She always had a way of seeing things before they began.
“Well we can’t just wait, you know,” Ma said. “It takes forever to get in if they don’t think you’re about to die.” She whispered the last word as if suddenly there were only the two of them in the room.
“Well I’m not so you don’t have to go imagining me in the ground already,” Aunt Lili pressed her lips tightly together. Her eyes flicked in my direction and she parted her lips letting a short sigh.
“I still have to finish this chapter for tomorrow,” I said, quickly squeezing her hand and making toward the door. Ma looked up, my presence suddenly shocking her field of vision.
“I’ll call them in the morning” Ma said as she turned back out of the door.
“See you tomorrow auntie!” I called over my shoulder.
I made a promise then that I would bring something next time. Bury part of myself here amongst the blooming surfaces of the front room. Something to keep us both company.
