In Banana Yoshimoto’s “The Premonition,” a character describes her childhood as a fairy tale. Another, while wandering at night with her brother, likens the two of them to Hansel and Gretel. Indeed, a childlike simplicity pervades the book, and it is sweet — until it becomes saccharine.

The novel was originally published in 1988 by writer Mahoko Yoshimoto, under her now well-known pseudonym. This month, it was released in English with translation by Asa Yoneda. The story’s protagonist is Yayoi, a 19-year-old girl with a happy nuclear family. Yet she’s haunted by visions she can’t explain, which lead her to unravel big family secrets. She goes to her aunt, Yukino, an eccentric young piano teacher, to seek out answers. When Yukino goes missing, Yayoi's younger brother, Tetsuo, aids the search as the facts of their past come to light.

The Premonition, By Banana Yoshimoto, Translated by Asa Yoneda. 144 pages, COUNTERPOINT, Fiction.

The characters move about in a dream-like state, but they never seem to transcend the fairy tale they live in. The novel takes a few steps toward more complex questions and ideas, but each trail goes cold as the story ultimately opts for sentimentality.

Yayoi’s powers of clairvoyance are one example. The first few scenes of the novel show Yayoi within “the picture of a happy middle-class family, like you’d see in a Spielberg movie.” But her visions and the mysterious Yukino, who bucks family propriety by failing to show up to her father’s funeral, hint at something sinister lingering beneath the surface. Early depictions of Yukino create a compelling character readers want to get to know, and Yayoi’s premonitions add a sense of suspense that pulls us along.

Yayoi, disturbed by one of her more violent visions, runs away to Yukino’s house and quickly learns that they are in fact sisters whose parents died in an accident when Yayoi was a baby. Yayoi was taken in by a family of no biological relation and has lived as their daughter since. Once this fact is revealed, what gave the story its energy quickly cools. Yayoi’s prescience and the darkness thrumming beneath her cheery life dissipate almost immediately. She realizes later that everyone, including her brother and Yukino’s teenage lover, has known about her provenance. What initially seemed to set Yayoi apart as special amounts to little more than a biographical switcheroo.

The facts of Yayoi’s family could have led to an exploration of chosen or adoptive families. But through the memories that surface, Yayoi’s biological parents turn out to have been even more perfect than her living ones: Her biological mother “was so deeply kind that she couldn’t help but feel sad when she saw people crying,” and her father, when he gets mercilessly pranked by Yukino, just “beams,” “not getting angry at all.” In fact, everyone in the novel seems unimpeachable: Yukino is radiantly beautiful, “incredibly true to herself,” someone who “can’t compromise”; Tetsuo is “just an easy person to love” with a “natural strength and positivity” who looks like a “slumbering god” while asleep.

Tetsuo’s super amazing wonderfulness in particular begins to steer the plot as it takes a hard left turn, becoming a love story between him and Yayoi. Early in the novel when Yayoi contemplates their strong sibling bond, it’s sweet. She receives a phone call and feels an energy “that was almost romantic” before she knows who’s on the line; when it turns out to be Tetsuo, the magnetism comes across as mystical. But soon after Yayoi learns they’re not biological siblings, she realizes her feelings toward her brother are actually sexual. Here, there is an opportunity for an exploration of the nature and nuances of attraction and romantic love, but instead the novel remains vague and Yayoi becomes increasingly maudlin.

Yoshimoto’s novel “Kitchen” was an instant sensation in Japan when it was released in 1988 and made the author one of the most recognizable names of contemporary Japanese fiction in the English-reading world (not least of all because of the resemblance of her pen name to the fruit). That story was far ahead of its time in the way it depicted a family with a transgender mother. In a similar way, “The Premonition” hints at social taboos — a relationship between brother and sister, and a high school teacher and her student — but it’s a shame that these get swept under the rug with the shy shrug of a naive teenager who’d rather not think too hard about what it all might mean.