A HUNDRED YEARS AND A DAY: 34 Stories defies all the Japanese-fiction expectations by embracing the form

A HUNDRED YEARS AND A DAY: 34 Stories
TOMOKA SHIBASAKI (tr. Polly Barton)
MONKEY/Stone Bridge Press
$9.95 ebook edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is a pattern I follow when reviewing short stories: I call it, for convenience, The Bryce Method after my old friend Bryce and his collection-spanning short summary followed by a very short summary and rating of the individual story habits from his blogging days.

Not going to work here.

Thirty-four stories in two hundred pages is problem one; not much between summary and spoiler. Two is these are stories that begin with something I'd call a spoiler: a summary-like paragraph set off from the text, which honestly took a half-star off my overall rating for off-puttingness. I think it's pointless, for these reasons, to use my old method as it would really add to the wall-to-wall spoilers. To avoid a close encounter with the shrieking Spoiler Stasi maniacs, allow me to review the gestalt of the collection for you.

It was fine. Nice prose, I'd say based on a long reading life with more than the usual number of translated works in many genres, quite gracefully translated. Plenty of well-woven-in clues to words that wouldn't translate. A solid, creditable job for a nice book of stories.

Does anything here do something that "pushes the short story to a new level"? No.

Does it really need to? No. Breathless copy does nothing good for this solid, well-crafted collection of short fiction mostly exploring the horrors of trying to communicate with actual other human beings in mutually satisfying connective ways. It's a collection full of fun, if weird, ways for that to fail. It has no central character or group, unlike that Ryu Murakami book I wasn't keen on that did mostly the same thing. It isn't set in one place like Pleasantville, that braided-stories novel I liked so well. In the off-kilter liminal spaces we're in for the whole collection, I'm most put in mind of the way Brian Evenson, in his uneasy style, makes the world feel. These are *not* horror, or even horror-adjacent, stories; instead, they partake of the weirdness and not-quite-ness of horror without any of the sillier trappings.

Polly Barton's ear for, say, how a wisteria vine relates to the wisteria vine it's been entwined with for goddesses only know how long, is the main vehicle for little minds like thee and me to get access to the core of longing and need in each of these very Japanese tales. Will we really know what's what? Not in my experience, and all the more fun to read because of it.

When I finished this read I had to sit a minute and look into my emotional reactor core to see what this bolus of new fuel was doing. I'm impressed that the way Author Shibasaki and her able translator, Polly Barton, never once threw a sucker punch. These stories deliver their intensely meant, unshielded radioactivity to you direct. It's not fussy; it's not overwrought; it's the high-quality story-ore, direct to your well-shielded reactor core to be processed.

I gave it a half-star less than perfect because, in some cases, the oddball opening paragraphs say too much even for me. That's hard to do!