“I feel like there must be some way”, ends the title of one story in Tomoka Shibasaki’s A Hundred Years and a Day, “of visiting the places that exist only in people’s memories.” Each of the 34 fictional vignettes in this collection is a standalone slice-of-life that features a character, now advanced into middle-age, recollecting a formative experience of their youth. Through these recollections, Shibasaki creates a humanistic chronicle that touches on the tragic beauty of mortality.

As the author’s synopsis-like story titles testify, the majority of these defining moments are small, commonplace incidents that go unnoticed when they occur. And yet, for the characters in this collection, they prove integral elements of identity that make them whole. Decades pass in these stories without description, and new unnamed characters arrive to take the place of those who have passed away. But through the little connections these generations share to both the landscape and one another, a human story emerges that is by parts melancholic and achingly nostalgic.

Some of these connections are made on journeys, but most are tied to geographical origins. Although much of the developed world has experienced the “rural exodus”, in which young people head for the cities and leave the countryside underpopulated, this phenomenon has been particularly pronounced in Japan, where many small towns teeter on the edge of oblivion. Likewise yearning for the city, the young characters of A Hundred Years and a Day move away from their rural and suburban birthplaces with the intention never to return, only to be drawn back decades later as strangers in strange lands. That strong homing instinct leads those within these stories only to a further awareness of what has been lost.

Though this focus on the things sacrificed to time and the alienation from home certainly makes Shibasaki’s work feel elegiac, it is never an outright lament; instead the sweet sorrow of parting is represented as a fact of life that, though painful, can be rewarding too. In a later story, “One day, there was a great snowfall…”, a small town is covered in dangerously deep levels of pure, white snow, leading the child protagonist to wonder whether “scary” and “beautiful” actually mean the same thing. In Shibasaki’s collection, there is little doubt that they do; the beauty of human connection here lies in its transience. The places once called home are also all the more treasured for their shifting nature—existing now only in memory, they become cherished possessions with their emotional belonging strengthened by their literal ephemerality.

Despite these stories containing few of what could be called “incidents”, each nevertheless manages to conclude in a satisfying manner because each feels true to the pattern of everyday life. At the end of the story “Yamamoto found a rooftop apartment to live in…,” for example, the titular character begins construction of a balcony on his house only to fall and break his shoulder. The story ends: “He paused his building work for a little while then, but resumed it again the following spring. Then he got a dog.” Though hardly monumental on the world stage, these events are key components of the life that contains them.

The sense of beauty of the everyday in these stories is reinforced by the matter-of-fact but strangely emotionally-affecting prose, which has been beautifully translated here by Polly Barton, a proven expert at reproducing the natural flow of both conversation and thought, but here equally adept at capturing Shibasaki’s dry but poignant style.

These realistic “uneventful events” are elevated by the aforementioned beauty of transience. For the characters in Shibasaki’s stories, the briefest and most seemingly insignificant interactions with people and the world return to them in their advancing years, proving these little moments to have been the most important of all. Shibasaki’s characters may yearn for places as they exist in memory, but the overall sense of history in this collection is an organic one that finds realization through human experience and connection. It is through the meaningful but brief interlocking of humanity that A Hundred Years and a Day captures the poetry of passing time.

Christopher Corker is a PhD candidate at York University and a published translator of Japanese literature.