The Place of Shells bookcover

The Place of Shells

Mai Ishizawa 

(Author)

Polly Barton 

(Translator)

This title will be released on

calendar iconMarch 11, 2025

4.9/5.0
21,000+ Reviews
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Description

In the summer of 2020, as Europe is beginning to open back up after the first phase of the pandemic, a young Japanese woman based in the German city of Göttingen is working on a PhD about the iconography of medieval saints. She waits at the train station to meet her old friend from graduate school, Nomiya, who died nine years earlier in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan, but has suddenly reemerged without any explanation.

When Nomiya arrives, the narrator guides him through Göttingen's scale model of the solar system, talking about her 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 beyond: eerie discoveries are made in the forest, Pluto begins disappearing and reappearing, and snags run in time's fabric. The narrative continues to spiral and unfold to include the Japanese physicist Terada Torahiko, mysteriously sprouting teeth, Saint Lucia, all set against the ever-lingering presence of death.

With a literary style reminiscent of W. G. Sebald, Yoko Tawada, and Yu Miri, The Place of Shells is a hypnotic, poetic novel that explores the ebbing and flowing of memory, its physical manifestations, its strange and sudden metaphors, and the overwhelming stranglehold of trauma.

Product Details

PublisherNew Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish DateMarch 11, 2025
Pages160
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9780811237789
DimensionsN/A

About the Author

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.
Polly Barton is a writer and Japanese translator based in Bristol. Her translations include Aoko Matsuda's Where the Wild Ladies Are, Kikuko Tsumura's There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job, and Tomoka Shibasaki's Spring Garden. In 2019, she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for her debut book Fifty Sounds. Her second book, Porn: An Oral History, is forthcoming.

Reviews

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
An exquisite, mysterious novel of mourning on a planetary scale.-- "Booklist"
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

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