Tomoka Shibasaki’s short stories don’t run on human time; they run on architectural time. In her curious collection “A Hundred Years and a Day,” released on Feb. 25 in English with translations by Polly Barton, the stories seem indifferent to their human characters.

The 34 stories, each somewhere between three to seven pages long, take place mostly in Japan, and occasionally in other unnamed countries. Characters, too, are usually unnamed (“my grandmother,” “student one,” “the wife”), which gives the stories an allegorical feel, as if each highly specific narrative could also be easily generalized.

A Hundred Years and a Day, by Tomoka Shibasaki. Translated by Polly Barton. 184 pages, STONE BRIDGE PRESS, fiction.

This specificity is underlined by comically long titles, like: “All the male children born into a family that ran a public bathhouse were given a name that included a specific kanji character, but nobody knew who first decided that that should be the case.” But, like an AI chatbot-generated summary, the titles are both on-the-nose and by necessity unable to capture the essence of the story.

The plots meander by design: Men sit by fountains and are forgotten; men live in hut-like structures and move around a lot; kids play soccer on a field where a woman once grew a massively long daikon. In several stories, characters are extremely close, then one disappears, then later reappears with little fanfare. Populations age and dwindle and move away. In one rare poignant scene, a child informs strangers passing through a town that “they were the last child in the village,” and that their graduation would bring the closure of schools and the end of festivals.

Japan Times

Time flows through structures: businesses, apartments, cinemas. In “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,” the shop is the central character around which people move and spaces are repurposed. The bar and shoe shop on either side get demolished; a nearby row house catches fire; the area is converted into a parking lot. It’s not a portrayal of one stalwart ramen shop owner’s refusal to change either; eventually the owner has to move on because of back and kidney problems, leaving House of the Future to a new proprietor.

In these stories, time has a way of leveling all human relationships and all work endeavors into a conclusion with no consequences. The collection’s indifference to its characters has neither the effect of being depressing nor uplifting, neither alienating nor freeing; it flattens with a total neutrality.

The stories seem to insist upon their own dispassion. In “Daughter Tales III,” “the younger daughter” tells a story and is repeatedly interrupted by “the daughter’s older sister,” who asks, “Wait, is this a scary story?” In another story, when a boy goes missing, I wonder the same: “Is this a scary story?” But at its conclusion, as if my thoughts have been heard, the narrator says, “It wasn’t a scary feeling. It was closer to a kind of nostalgia.” No fear or sadness to be had here, please move along.

There are very few stakes in this collection, and even less drama. The stories bleed together and repeat, creating a pathos-free passivity that washes over the reader, who witnesses time in a new way. Those looking for nostalgic fog and a vague sense of loss will have plenty to perambulate, but those seeking a page-turner should look elsewhere.