"Missed connections and the passage of time feature in this captivating collection by Akutagawa Prize winner Shibasaki (Spring Garden). Bartons light touch preserves the mystery and longing in Shibasakis liminal tales."
Publishers Weekly Starred Review
"Stories bleed 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
"A Hundred Years and A Day will inevitably tug at heartstrings and cause readers to reminisce about a simpler time."
Walter Sim, The Strait Times
"Each of the 34 fictional vignettes in this collection is a standalone slice-of-life that touches on the tragic beauty of mortality."
Christopher Corker, Asian Review of Books
"Tomoka Shibasakis A Hundred Years and a Day delights in the aesthetic of gentle decline, and the collection expresses a gorgeously articulated nostalgia for people and places left behind in the past."
Contemporary Japanese Literature
"Shibasaki makes us think about the way stories are told, what we expect, and what we think we know. She is very good at giving us the pleasure of wondering how things are going to happen rather than what is going to happen, and then she reverses this."
Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World
"A Hundred Years and a Day provides something a little different from contemporary J-Lit, and in a world swimming with books about cats and coffee shops, that makes for a welcome change."
Tony's Reading List
Japanese reviews of A Hundred Years and a Day
This collection offers a series of those startling moments when the lives of some distant, unknown someone become, fleetingly, your own.
Sachiko Kishimoto, author and translator
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
Praise for Spring Garden
Like a good meditation: quiet, surprising and deeply satisfying.
New York Times Book Review
Atmospheric, meditative story of memory and loss in a gentrifying Tokyo neighborhood . . . An elegant story that is in many ways more reminiscent of Mishima and Akutagawa than many contemporary Japanese writers.
Kirkus Reviews