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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 Publishers Weekly

“Shibasaki creates a humanistic chronicle that touches on the tragic beauty of mortality. . . . The sense of beauty of the everyday is reinforced by the matter-of-fact but strangely emotionally affecting prose, which has been beautifully translated here by Polly Barton, a proven expert at reproducing the natural flow of both conversation and thought, but here equally adept at capturing Shibasaki’s dry but poignant style.“
—Christopher Corker, Asian Review of Books

“A finely wrought tapestry of life in Japan and abroad, imbued with universal themes of family, memory, resilience, and change. The stories capture moments both fleeting and profound, rendered with precision, warmth, and a gentle but unflinching eye."
— Renae Lucas-Hall, The Japan Society Review, UK 

“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

“Stories blend 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

“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.