Harare Review of Books

184 pp. Published February 25, 2025 by Stone Bridge Press. Fiction anthology.

---

It’s hard to put into words why I liked this, but I’ll try. I’m a fan of quiet books when they’re literary—where not a lot goes on, a narration of what could be banal day-to-day life but where you’re conscious of the author’s skill in extracting quirky details or in making the mundane just that little bit strange. Tomoka Shibasaki is clearly a master of the genre. The first clue is in the chapter headings, which are tiny stories in themselves:

1 One summer during a long rainy spell, student number one from class one and student number one from class two discover mushrooms growing in a flower bed next to a covered walkway at their school; two years after leaving school they bump into each other, but after that, ten years pass, twenty years pass, and they don’t meet again

2 The tobacco shop on the corner was draped in wisteria that burst into glorious blossom every spring; upon close inspection, it became clear that this wisteria was actually two wisteria plants that had grown intertwined; these days nobody remembered that one of them had been found on the street years before

3 A man in exile swims to a bay on an island, where he is rescued by a young boy and an old man; after the war ends, the man stays on in the village but barely speaks to anyone except the young boy

In these stories, people live in a place, and then move to other places. Buildings get demolished, and new ones are built in their place. Some buildings endure over a long time, like the ramen shop in one story. There’s one story set at an airport terminal, and another at a tiny train station. There’s a touch of the future, too: future resorts, and spaceships.

Mainly, Shibasaki seems to be preoccupied with time and how it changes people and places, with how time haunts us through memories and, like in a time lapse, the cyclical creation and destruction happening around us in urban settings. It’s meditative and thoroughly mesmerising. In the words of one character:

“I feel like I want to see the places that someone else saw, he said; I like thinking about places I’ve been to once but I no longer know how to get to, or places that you can only access at certain times, I feel like there must be some way of visiting the places that exist only in people’s memories.”

I loved this, and will read it again, likely many times over.

Thanks to Stone Bridge Press and NetGalley for DRC access.

Affiliate link: Support independent bookshops and my writing by ordering it from Bookshop here: Paperback | Ebook