In the summer of 2020, a young Japanese academic based in the German city of Göttingen waits at the train station to meet her old friend Nomiya, who died nine years earlier in Japan's devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami but has now inexplicably returned from the dead. As soon as he arrives, she guides him through the city, showing him Göttingen's scale model of the solar system and talking about her PhD studies, her roommate, and their mutual friends. Yet it isn't long before his spectral presence in the city begins to fray the narrator's psyche and destabilize the world around them: eerie objects are found in the forest, the model of Pluto begins disappearing and reappearing, and threads in the fabric of time start unraveling. The narrative continues to spiral and unfold, with the presence of death ever lingering.
Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, The Place of Shells is a hypnotic, poetic novel that explores the ebb and flow of memory—its physical manifestations, its sudden detours—and the overwhelming stranglehold of trauma.
An exquisite, mysterious novel of mourning on a planetary scale.
— Booklist
Here we find a form of language that attempts to venture, dancing, into a past enveloped in silence after the disappearance of those who were absent.
— Yoko Tawada
A work of great delicacy and seriousness. Ishizawa anchors the temporal and the ghostly with a transfixing pragmatism, and the result is a shifting, tessellated kaleidoscope of memory, architecture, history and grief.
— Jessica Au
The characters in Mai Ishizawa’s The Place of Shells have all, it seems, come to understand that there is no ‘regular’ course of the world, that calamity and disaster are part of its recurrent processes, that we must constantly mourn and repair and make sense of that which lacks sense.
— Dante Silva, The Brooklyn Rail
Missing persons and dogs, the dead and the living, are all on an even footing, interacting with equality. The multilayered intertwining of their memories saw me several times losing my perspective and growing dizzy, and the next thing I knew, I had been dragged into even deeper territory than I was expecting. This attempt to imprint upon humanity the experiences of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in a way that only a novel can achieve deserves to be highly esteemed.
— Yoko Ogawa
The Place of Shells is a meditation on art, death, and belonging. It reads like an eerie, shimmering fever dream where the boundaries between past and present, reality and fantasy, life and death often shatter. A strange and beautiful memento mori of a novel
— Jenny Mustard, author of Okay Days
The Place of Shells inhabits the crusted border between words and embodied experiences, particularly when registering mass trauma. Ishizawa—whose personal biography greatly mirrors the narrator’s—traverses the boundary between public and private memory, enduring and letting go.
— Anabelle Johnston, Los Angeles Review of Books
Wrought in Polly Barton’s rhythmic prose, Ishizawa’s narrative features a procession of revenants, saints, and an olfactorily gifted truffle dog that put me in mind of Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera. What the sensitive canine sniffs out, in the diaphanous irreality opened up by the text, are lost objects that accrete within themselves histories of trauma.
— Alex Tan, Asymptote
This book, translated from the Japanese with great elegance by Polly Barton, suggests a way into re-enchantment with the world… its central appeal lies in the author’s extraordinary ability to convey impressions and sensations with great precision and beauty.
— Patricio Pron, Berlin Review
Ishizawa’s poetic prose embraces art along with both Japanese and German culture, and her novel becomes a hypnotic dissection of memory, trauma and belonging that many will relate to. Though face masks make a regular appearance, the narrative comes across as timeless, perhaps because the story seems suspended in a timeline of its own.
