Abstract

This masterful and utterly unique collection from beloved writer Tomoka Shibasaki pushes the short story form to new places.
Across a vast range of different places—schools, islands, houses, apartments, cinemas, cafes, fountain plazas in underground shopping malls, and airports, both in Japan and all over the world—diverse people come together to share pieces of their lives, and then part ways to tread separate paths through time.
We meet the women who share a house out of necessity after the outbreak of war, before parting to live in separate countries once its over, the man who lives in a succession of different apartments with the unifying feature of being all on the roof; the old ramen restaurant named Future Ramen that endures despite the demolition and development of the surrounding buildings; and the people who watch a new model of spaceship lift off from a pier belonging to the resort hotel which was built after the tourist ferries stopped serving the area…

These 33 tales from all over the planet have the feel and the compulsive power of real stories that are here being told for the first time, both unremarkable and exceptional, narrated in a crisp, almost allegorical style. While they are very much stand-alone stories, the episodes nonetheless share similar concerns, most notably a fascination with the changes to places over time and the effect they have on people. Another unifying and beguiling feature is the exceptionally long titles that all the stories are given—“Growing up, two brothers are told how well they get on; the elder brother moves away to study; the younger takes up the guitar, becomes famous; on a television in an izakaya, the elder brother sees his sibling again after a long absence”—which bolsters the universal, allegorical note running through the book, while marking it immediately as a work rich with playfulness and creativity. Sometimes we discover people’s names, and other times the characters remain unnamed—in either case, the outlines retain an abbreviated quality, like simple line-drawings, which allow the reader to fill in the blanks with their own imaginations, generating a curious and immediate sense of connection.
Unique yet disarmingly matter-of-fact, universal yet affecting, experimental yet engaging —twenty two years into her career, Shibasaki has produced a short story collection like no other.

Author’s Information

Tomoka Shibasaki was born in 1973 in Osaka. In 2000, she published her debut, A Day On The Planet, later made into a 2004 film by Isao Yukisada. Her 2007 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 screen by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and screened at Cannes. In 2014, Shibasaki won the Akutagawa Award for her book Spring Garden, now translated into many languages including English (published by Pushkin Press).