From the beloved, bestselling author of Kitchen, comes a deeply haunting, heartwarming exploration of loneliness and painful memories set in Japan.
'Polished, concise, emotionally rewarding.' Daily Mail
'Reading Banana Yoshimoto is like taking a bracing, cleansing bath.' LING MA
'Gorgeous . . . an invitation to explore [Yoshimoto's] unusual, alluring world.' The Telegraph
I had a premonition of setting out on a journey and getting lost inside a distant tide ... It was the beginning of summer, and I was nineteen years old.
Yayoi lives with her perfect, loving family - something 'like you'd see in a Spielberg movie'. But while her parents tell happy stories of her childhood, she is increasingly haunted by the sense that she's forgotten something important about her past.
Deciding to take a break, she stays with her eccentric but beloved aunt Yukino. Living a life without order, Yukino seems to be protecting herself, but beneath this facade Yayoi starts to recover lost memories, and everything she knows about her past threatens to change forever.