21-02-2025
'A Hundred Years and a Day': Short stories unfold through the lives of structures and spaces
Tomoka Shibasaki's short stories don't run on human time; they run on architectural time. In her curious collection
The 34 stories, each somewhere between three to seven pages long, take place mostly in Japan, and occasionally in other unnamed countries. Characters, too, are usually unnamed ('my grandmother,' 'student one,' 'the wife'), which gives the stories an allegorical feel, as if each highly specific narrative could also be easily generalized.
A Hundred Years and a Day, by Tomoka Shibasaki.
Translated by Polly Barton.
184 pages, STONE BRIDGE PRESS, fiction.
