The Place of Shells

WINNER OF THE AKUTAGAWA PRIZE

'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, author of The Memory Police

'Here we find a form of language that attempts to venture, dancing, into a past enveloped in silence'

Yoko Tawada, author of The Last Children of Tokyo

'An eerie, shimmering fever dream . . . strange and beautiful'

Jenny Mustard, author of Okay Days

In the summer of 2020, as Germany slowly emerges from lockdown, a young Japanese woman studying in Gottingen waits at the train station to meet an old friend. Nomiya died a decade earlier in the Tohoku tsunami, but he has suddenly returned without any explanation.

The reunited friends share a past that's a world away from the tranquillity of Gottingen. Yet Nomiya's spectral presence destabilises something in the city: mysterious guests appear, eerie discoveries are made in the forest and, as the past becomes increasingly vivid, the threads of time threaten to unravel.

With a literary style reminiscent of W. G. Sebald, Yoko Tawada, and Yu Miri, The Place of Shells is an astounding exploration of the strange orbits of memory and the haunting presence of the past.

An exquisite, mysterious novel of mourning on a planetary scale. Booklist
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, author of Cold Enough for Snow
Here we find a form of language that attempts to venture, dancing, into a past enveloped in silence -- Yoko Tawada, author of The Last Children of Tokyo
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 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in a way that only a novel can achieve deserves to be highly esteemed -- Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police
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 <What a Time to Be Alive
A strange and slim novel of erudition [that] captures the emotional haze in the aftermath of disaster . . . somewhere between W. G. Sebald and Hiromi Kawakami . . . "Trauma," "memory" and "survivor's guilt" are all keywords that could be generically tagged to this book's metadata, but it's much more than the sum of its contents. The intricate writerly prose is a welcome departure from the stilted, often underwritten language ubiquitous in Japanese novels translated into English today. . . . it reads like poetry, or a prayer. The characters keep coming and going, crossing and circling, searching and suffering, living inside the reverberations of history. Japan Times
At once domestic and otherworldly, intimate yet austere . . . for a slim novel, Ishizawa sweeps across tragedies of personal and global order. Gratifyingly, the novel does so without veering into cliches; while it makes many generalities about the nature of remembrance and grief, Ishizawa evades sentimentality. Her language remains precise and piercing amid the absurd: the stilted nature of certain phrases, the repetition of both imagery and feeling. -- Anabelle Johnston Los Angeles Review of Books
Like a memory, this book does not lose the quality of pain and loss, which captures everything that is shaky and incomprehensible -- Misha Honcharenko, author of Trap Unfolds Me Greedily

Mai Ishizawa was born in 1980 in Sendai City, Japan, and currently lives in Germany. Her debut novel, The Place of Shells, won the Akutagawa Prize.

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