Long ago, in a 1990s introduction to psychology college class, our instructor lectured on the concept of personal strangers, those individuals we meet at street corners or the grocery cashiers bagging our eggs and milk, the faces we might recognize in their cars going to work when we’re waiting for a street light to change to green. I remember looking around at our auditorium classroom of 300 students — those taking this class with me, located on the aisles or in the nosebleed seats — whom I’d never spoken to. Who knew how we came together or how we would part?
Tomoka Shibasaki’s A Hundred Years and a Day is a collection of 34 short stories. The titles are brief summaries that prepare the reader for what is to come, like in “#10: A ramen shop called House of the Future stayed open for a long time; the other businesses around it vanished, apartments were built, and people came and went.” While familiar, none of these accounts are cliché or sentimental.
On an initial read through, these condensed prose pieces read like small, commonplace incidents that go unnoticed when they first occur, of briefly intersecting paths and lives. Maybe it’s because I’m in my retirement years, but often the stories feel like newsy accounts passed on from one person to another, like my father bemoaning the fact that Chubby and Tubby’s was gone from Rainier Avenue each time we drove past its former place. Chubby and Tubby’s would always be the same in his memory, the store where we bought boots, raincoats, and super-cheap Christmas trees.
Many central characters in One Hundred Years and a Day grow older after they make an observation or connection in their youth, which becomes nostalgic and elegiac (and sometimes incorrectly remembered) in tone. As years pass by in a brief paragraph, this moment becomes fable-like. It’s this quiet, slow journey that is transitory, fleeting, and so human. This acknowledgement by one person (and often without an audience) can make the memory personally poetic for the character and the reader.
In one tale about a novelist who dies, her daughter reflects: “I guess in a few years after we die there’ll be nobody who remembers her, or this house. Maybe there’ll still be people reading Mom’s books, though. It’s funny to think of her books on someone’s shelves, somewhere.”
And in “Family Tree III,” a man plays “an old guitar his boss’s son had given him. … After a while, he began making up his own songs … he would sit on the riverbank close to the bridge and sing out over the water. They were songs that were only ever sung once.” Eventually, a man on his way home from playing baseball would stop to listen. The narrator concludes: “The songs that my grandmother’s brother played back then are known only to him and that man.”
For readers who need a more traditional structure, these writings may leave them wanting more than a summary or synopsis, a tale told by an omniscient narrator. But what’s central to these stories is the meditative tone and how in a seemingly routine life, change is often based on geography and relocation. These shifts are how the characters can perceive a nuanced surprise. So much of human behavior and action is connected to others who are ignored or taken for granted. Often, only when it has gone physically missing does the memory become ingrained. Against a backdrop of telling exposition, Shibasaki’s characterization is spare, and her narration can jump to other points of view. Conflict can seem to be missing or uneventful. But it’s in the slow accumulation of time passing, of noticing something small yet meaningful in another perspective, where the poetic turn exists and where one can savor the moment. Nothing stays the same, and nobody is the same person they were yesterday.
Not all of these stories will connect, since readers vary with interest and experience, but the ones that do will strongly resonate. Long after a story has been read, the insight and realization may come to a reader out of the blue.
These stories are best read one or two at a time and savored. My favorite is a piece where there is a great snowfall in a place where snow never usually settled. Two boys, one of whom will go missing, observe: “The town was so dark that it was hard to believe it was in the middle of the day. … The sounds of their voices and their feet treading the snow were instantly absorbed by the dark masses of snow and the dim shadows.” Later, one of the boys will wonder “if in fact the two words, scary and beautiful, meant the same thing.”
Shibasaki has won the Noma Literary Prize and the Akutagawa Prize. Two of her works have been adapted for film.
A Hundred Years and a Day has stuck with me. I know that in time other amazing insights will fall into their place.
