MONKEY IMPRINT

A Hundred Years and a Day: 34 Stories 

Published on February 25, 2025

“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. Readers of Aimee Bender or Haruki Murakami will love this.”
— Starred review in Publisher's Weekly

"A Hundred Years and a Day disrupts the modern myth that progress is not just desirable, but inevitable. Things don’t always get better, Shibasaki demonstrates, nor do endings always happen with a bang. . . . The theme of human connection runs through Shibasaki’s work like a gentle current, drawing the reader forward on the steadily flowing stream of time.”
— Kathryn Hemmann, Contemporary Japanese Literature

"In A Hundred Years and a Day, time flows architecturally, through the life of structures such as a ramen shop or a cinema. These stories don't run on human time; they run on architectural time." 
— Japan Times

“Shibasaki makes us think about the way stories are told—what we expect, and what we think we know.”
— Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World

“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

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.

TOMOKA SHIBASAKI is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Her works have been adapted into films and received numerous awards, including the Akutagawa Prize in 2014.

POLLY BARTON is a literary translator based in the UK and the author of Fifty Sounds, a personal dictionary of the Japanese language.