3 ideas
In a small Westerwald village, the grandmother Selma dreams of an okapi, and within about a day someone in the village always dies. After one such dream the whole village waits in dread. Luise's best friend Martin, a young boy, is the one who dies: he is killed in an accident on the local train. The prophecy proves true, but it strikes the person no one had feared for.
Selma's omen says a death is coming but not whose, so every villager has to act as though it could be their own last day. Uncertainty spread across everyone turns private dread into shared behavior. People confess, settle accounts and write long-withheld letters. Many of them then scramble to take those truths back once the danger has passed.
Martin's death in childhood leaves Luise wary of letting anything new into her life, because she has learned that what you love can vanish without warning. Her adult timidity in love, including toward Frederik, a German monk living in Japan, comes from that early lesson. The novel suggests the people and rituals around you do not remove this fear. They only make it bearable enough to live alongside.