Yuka Ishii's Hyakunen Doro is a fantastical novel in which a narrator caught in a flood in Chennai sees a century of memories and lives rise from the mud. Real cross-cultural experience merges with wild invention to illuminate lives that might have been.

From flood mud emerge a century of memories and lives that might have been.

Chisako Wakatake's Ora Ora de Hitori Igumo follows an elderly widow who listens to inner voices shaped by Tohoku speech as she faces loneliness and freedom. It depicts grief while also finding richness in living alone.

In age and solitude, inner voices open a new freedom.