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

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'

Booklist

'A work of great delicacy'

Jessica Au, author of Cold Enough to Snow

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 to 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

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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