In her new collection, A Hundred Years and a Day: 34 Stories, Tomoka Shibasaki—acclaimed author of the novel Spring Garden—offers a masterful selection of stories that redefine the boundaries of the short story.
Fluidly translated by award-winning translator Polly Barton, A Hundred Years and a Day will join the roster alongside Hiromi Kawakami, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, and Hiromi Ito as the fourth publication from our MONKEY imprint in partnership with MONKEY: New Writing from Japan.
The stories in A Hundred Years and a day capture a vivid spectrum of people and places: wartime housemates who share secrets and meals until they inevitably go their separate ways, a man drifting through rooftop apartments, latch-key brothers shaped by industrial life and diverging paths, an enduring ramen shop amid a landscape of demolition, and curious onlookers observing a spaceship launch at an abandoned island resort pier.
Each tale opens a small window into a distinct world, yet they share a haunting resonance—a sense of people both tethered and unmoored by their relationships, spaces, and experiences.
Osaka-born author Tomoka Shibasaki published her debut in 2000, when she was 27. It was adapted by Japanese director Isao Yukisada and released as a film in 2004 (A Day on the Planet).
In 2007 her novel Sono machi no ima wa (That Town Today) was awarded the Geijutsu Sensho Newcomers Prize, the Sakunosuke Oda Award, and the Sakuya Konohana Award.
In 2010, her novel Asako I & II received the Noma Newcomer’s Award; the book was subsequently adapted for film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and was screened at Cannes.
In 2014, Shibasaki won the Akutagawa Prize for her novel Spring Garden, now translated into many languages, including English (published by Pushkin Press).
A Hundred Years and a Day is translated by UK-based award-winning translator Polly Barton. Her translations include the aforementioned Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki (Pushkin Press, 2017), Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Tilted Axis / Soft Skull Press, 2020), There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (Bloomsbury, 2021), and So We Look to the Sky by Misumi Kubo (Arcade, 2021).
After being awarded the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, in 2021 she published Fifty Sounds, her reflections on the Japanese language. Her translations of stories by Aoko Matsuda, Tomoka Shibasaki, and Kikuko Tsumura also frequently appear in MONKEY New Writing from Japan.
A Hundred Years and a Day: 34 Stories by Tomoka Shibasaki, translated by Polly Barton will be available in both print and digital everywhere February 25th, 2025.
Get your copy here.
Read an excerpt from A Hundred Years and a Day below.
31
Mako was always watching TV; after seeing an astronaut on TV she decided to become an astronaut, and went to the moon
Mako Kondō would turn on the TV as soon as she got home from school and watch reruns of dramas and anime, and then she’d leave it on while the evening news played. It was the exact same most days. All her friends went to cram school, but Mako didn’t. Instead she watched TV.
Into the summer vacation, the people in her year would attend what they called “summer courses,” and the amount of time Mako spent alone increased. All of that became TV time. One day, as she was reading manga with the news on in the background, she heard the presenter announce that the first Japanese female astronaut had gone up in a space shuttle. Flicking her eyes to the screen, she saw a female astronaut in a blue spacesuit floating in a white-walled vestibule inside the shuttle, carrying out some kind of test. At that moment, Mako decided that she would also become an astronaut, and started studying on her own.
Even into junior high and then senior high Mako couldn’t go to cram school, so when school finished she’d go to the library, stopping by the staff room when she wanted to ask the teachers questions. She asked so many questions that one teacher remarked to her, “This isn’t a cram school, you know!” Yet Mako continued unfazed, and became the first person from her school to get into the science department of a national university in the Kantō region.
Mako liked university, because it enabled her to study the things she wanted to her heart’s content. Once she started her graduate course and joined the research department, she stayed there late every night. She made sure to factor in time to build up her physical strength and to study the foreign languages needed to become an astronaut. When she returned late to her small dorm room, she would watch TV for the short period until she fell asleep. There were no longer any programs she particularly enjoyed, but switching on the TV was a habit for her, and somehow having it on helped her to fall to sleep. She imagined that it was because, so long as she was watching TV, she wasn’t using her brain.
She usually set the TV to switch off automatically at a certain time, but once, when she woke in the middle of the night, it was still on. The screen showed a foreign film where an astronaut was left alone in a spaceship. After much strenuous effort, the astronaut managed to return to earth, but all the people on earth had since died. Plants and animals lived on—had, in fact, grown more abundant now that there were no humans around. The movie ended with a scene where the astronaut looked out at that beautiful scenery and cried. Mako fell asleep before seeing it.
Fifteen years later, a space shuttle took off from a desert somewhere in the Middle East with Mako inside it. The space shuttle, which had five astronauts on board, was carrying humans to the moon for the first time in sixty years. Mako became the first woman to walk on the moon. Looking at Earth from the moon’s surface, it struck Mako that it was the same colors as the Earth she’d seen on TV as a child. All the students from Mako’s elementary school watched Mako walking on the moon on TV. It was Mako’s request that they did so, and she had donated ten TV sets to the school for that purpose.
A Hundred Years and a Day: 34 Stories by Tomoka Shibasaki, translated by Polly Barton will be available in both print and digital everywhere February 25th, 2025.
Get your copy here.