A Hundred Years and a Day - by Tomoka Shibasaki

Book Synopsis

This ground-breaking collection from Tomoka Shibasaki, author of the acclaimed novel Spring Garden, pushes the short story to a new level.

In these stories of human connection in a contemporary, alienated world, people come together to share pieces of their lives, then part. We meet the women who share a house after the outbreak of war before going their separate ways once it is over; the man who lives in a succession of rooftop apartments; the diverging lives of two brothers who are raised as latch-key kids by factory workers; the old ramen restaurant that endures despite the demolition of all surrounding buildings; people who watch a new type of spaceship lift off from a pier that once belonged to an island resort; and more.

These 34 tales from all over the planet have the compulsive power of news reports, narrated in a crisp yet allegorical style.

Review Quotes

"Missed connections and the passage of time feature in this captivating collection by Akutagawa Prize winner Shibasaki (Spring Garden). Barton's light touch preserves the mystery and longing in Shibasaki's liminal tales."

-Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"Stories bleed together and repeat, creating a pathos-free passivity that washes over the reader, who witnesses time in a new way."

--Thu-Huong Ha, The Japan Times

"A Hundred Years and A Day will inevitably tug at heartstrings and cause readers to reminisce about a simpler time."

--Walter Sim, The Strait Times

"Each of the 34 fictional vignettes in this collection is a standalone slice-of-life that touches on the tragic beauty of mortality."

--Christopher Corker, Asian Review of Books

"Tomoka Shibasaki's A Hundred Years and a Day delights in the aesthetic of gentle decline, and the collection expresses a gorgeously articulated nostalgia for people and places left behind in the past."

--Contemporary Japanese Literature

"Shibasaki makes us think about the way stories are told, what we expect, and what we think we know. She is very good at giving us the pleasure of wondering how things are going to happen rather than what is going to happen, and then she reverses this."

--Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World

"A Hundred Years and a Day provides something a little different from contemporary J-Lit, and in a world swimming with books about cats and coffee shops, that makes for a welcome change."

--Tony's Reading List

Japanese reviews of A Hundred Years and a Day

"This collection offers a series of those startling moments when the lives of some distant, unknown someone become, fleetingly, your own."

--Sachiko Kishimoto, author and translator

"Behold as time and space are warped through the power of words. This is a feat only literature can achieve."

--Masafumi Gotoh, musician, Asian Kung-Fu Generation

Praise for Spring Garden

"Like a good meditation: quiet, surprising and deeply satisfying."

--New York Times Book Review

"Atmospheric, meditative story of memory and loss in a gentrifying Tokyo neighborhood . . . An elegant story that is in many ways more reminiscent of Mishima and Akutagawa than many contemporary Japanese writers."

--Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

TOMOKA SHIBASAKI published her debut in 2000 when she was 27; it was adapted by Isao Yukisada and released as a film in 2004 (A Day on the Planet). Her 2007 novel Sono machi no ima wa (That Town Today) was awarded the Geijutsu Sensho Newcomers Prize, the Sakunosuke Oda Award, and the Sakuya Konohana Award. In 2010, her novel Asako I & II received the Noma Newcomer's Award; the book was subsequently adapted for film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and screened at Cannes. In 2014, Shibasaki won the Akutagawa Prize for her novel Spring Garden, now translated into many languages, including English (published by Pushkin Press).

POLLY BARTON is an award-winning translator based in the UK. Her translations include Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki (Pushkin Press, 2017), Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Tilted Axis / Soft Skull Press, 2020), There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (Bloomsbury, 2021), and So We Look to the Sky by Misumi Kubo (Arcade, 2021). After being awarded the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, in 2021 she published Fifty Sounds, her reflections on the Japanese language. Her translations of stories by Aoko Matsuda, Tomoka Shibasaki, and Kikuko Tsumura appear in MONKEY New Writing from Japan.