Happy families are all alike: They’re good at keeping secrets. Yayoi, the 19-year-old protagonist of Banana Yoshimoto’s “The Premonition,” lives among a very happy family. Dad is a doctor, Mom is a nurse, and together they have raised two children: Yayoi and her brother, Tetsuo, who is only a year younger.

Among the four there exists an easy acceptance of domestic life, the kind of ease that biological relations always promise but almost never actually deliver. “Mom bustled around the house joyfully,” “Dad protected us with a strong heart full of nothing but devotion,” and Tetsuo is a “special” kid, “born with a beautiful soul.” And yet Yayoi, so charmed by the domestic pleasures of family life, which seems always to march diligently and delightfully forward, is struck by a gaping absence in her past: She has no childhood memories.

But then, on a gentle, ordinary day, when a light rain shower is improbably illuminated by the midday sun, she has a vision.

Her mother is working in the garden, her father is out for a walk, Tetsuo is building a house for their soon-to-arrive puppy and Yayoi, weaving through all of them, begins to feel the impressions of another life. The images appear in quick succession: a slender hand, arranging flowers; a couple walking slowly; a pigtailed little girl, warning of a typhoon. Yayoi recognizes the little girl immediately: She is her sister. What sister? Yayoi isn’t sure, but she feels the vision to be true. “I have family, blood family, somewhere,” she thinks in disbelief, “not here.”

As the title suggests, the novel’s plot thickens around this and other “premonitions,” which are actually more like hauntings: Yayoi is rarely visited by the knowledge of something that will happen in the future, only suddenly able to glean what has happened in her past.

Her inklings arrive fully formed and propel her to immediate action. She feels drawn, as if by fate, to the disorderly home of her 30-year-old aunt, where “time had no foothold” and Yayoi is thrust into her aunt’s routines, filled with the idiosyncratic pleasures of self-determination. They eat flan out of the mixing bowl and sleep whenever they please.

When her aunt disappears, Yayoi feels compelled to trail in her wake, every partial memory a pertinent clue. As a detective, Yayoi is all intuition. She discovers very little evidence other than what arises naturally, if mystifyingly, in her mind and body, and her journey is without generic red herrings and dead ends; every lead is self-generated and ends in self-discovery.

Fans of “Kitchen,” the 1988 debut that turned Yoshimoto into a sensation, will delight in Asa Yoneda’s translation of “The Premonition,” which was published in Japan the same year and contains similarly luscious twists of domestic fate. There’s a matter-of-factness to Yoshimoto’s prose that would feel stultifying if it weren’t so mischievous. I found it difficult to read sentences like, “Suddenly, everything made sense,” without feeling that I was being served a maxim when I thought I’d ordered psychological intrigue.