The Place of Shells is a contemplative novel about memories and the way we treat the past, and the way the influences of the past impact people in the present and how those past events have a way of resurfacing in sometimes peculiar ways. There is a degree of magical realism in this book which I enjoyed, because it made sense in the context of the narrative - I always like it when departures from realism serve a particular purpose that can be analysed rather than merely being there to provide whimsy. The pace of the writing is slow, but I find that as long as a novel is short that doesn't bother me. I would recommend this book to readers of Japanese classics since it evokes similar feelings

this was too chunky for me. the first half felt lit fic, the second half felt fantasy/dystopia, with too much wondering text. clearly a talented writer and great idea but not for me

Mai Ishizawa’s unnamed narrator left Japan to complete an art history doctorate in Göttingen, renowned German university city – the narrator’s life overlaps with Isizawa’s own. Three years later, it’s the first year of the Covid Pandemic and restrictions are slowly being lifted. In the middle of the sweltering summer, the narrator waits near the train station for a visitor, her old friend Nomiya. He’s here for an academic project. She hasn’t seen him for nine years, not since he died during the March 2011 tsunami that swept the coast of northeastern Japan. His body was never recovered. But this isn’t a conventional ghost story and Nomiya’s sudden reappearance isn’t presented as especially startling. Although, it seems significant that Nomiya’s arrival is close to the beginning of Obon, Japanese festival of the spirits of the dead when ghosts return to former homes and families. The narrator feels frozen somehow, still unable to fully process her reactions to what happened to Nomiya – at the time she was in Sendai in the Tōhoku earthquake zone. This physical distance has somehow been translated into emotional distance. On some level the narrator is grieving but uncertain if she actually has the right. Her anxieties and sense of isolation intensified by the ongoing pandemic.

Ishizawa’s award-winning narrative gradually forms a complex meditation on suffering, remembrance and time. As part of that it resurrects and reworks elements of Tumarkin’s concept of traumascapes: sites which witnessed devastating events. Here these are both internal and external. For the narrator her sense memories make the very ground she walks on seem precarious, it might open up under her feet at any moment. But the city is also weighed down by past traumas which slowly rise to the surface. During his walks in the surrounding forest, Hector, the small, truffle-hunting dog who lives with the narrator, starts to unearth curious objects – objects which turn out to be potent reminders of individual loss and sorrow. Strange smells flooding the streets trace back to Nazi book-burnings, the sound of distant footsteps carve out the path taken by Jews herded towards trains bound for concentration camps. Scenes from Göttingen’s history replay, shimmering, mirage-like manifestations.

Göttingen’s Planetenwegen - model of a planetary path found in numerous German cities - is abruptly altered. Pluto, associated with death and the underworld, once marked its ending but was removed when its astronomical status changed. Now it’s back flickering in and out of view, a lure for modern-day pilgrims. As people start to shed their Covid masks, history, time, even space, are also unmasking. The narrator is caught up in bizarre chains of association stirred by artworks she’s studying, particularly the saints rendered identifiable by symbols of their tortured lives and deaths such as the arrows piercing Saint Sebastian’s flesh. Shell imagery abounds and proliferates from the shells carried by pilgrims in search of peace or atonement to the shell dinner organised by the narrator’s friend and language tutor Ursula. The sight of scallops arouses memories of Nomiya’s childhood. Time refuses the linear instead it spirals and loops.

Ursula’s guests include Terada a new pupil and a recent acquaintance of Nomiya’s. But Terada too is a spectre. He’s long-dead Torahiko Terada, scientific observer of earthquakes and responses to natural disasters. He also, uncoincidentally, appeared as Kangetsu Mizushima in one of Sōseki’s novels. The narrator’s detailed accounts of Göttingen’s layout become less geography than uncanny psychogeography; partly conjured through language like Terada’s invocation of abandoned Japanese systems of naming. Images of light and dark abound, figures disappear into “whiteness” recalling the city’s former scientists whose work fed into the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The city and its inhabitants are transformed into a living, breathing archive. Irreality is supplanted by surreality.

Despite its hallucinatory aspect, Ishizawa’s novel has an oddly detached feel, dream-like yet restrained and disciplined. It’s partly inspired by Michael Ende, and by Natsume Sōseki’s story “Ten Nights of Dreams.” At one point, Terada suggests they’re playing out an “eleventh dream.” However, Ishizawa’s meditations on memory, trauma and survivor guilt come to a surprisingly concrete, if ritualistic conclusion, one which finally provides the narrator with the release she so desperately craves. In many ways this is a very impressive debut and Ishizawa’s an author well worth following. But, like so many first novels, it’s overpacked, too detailed, too bristling with ideas. It’s definitely inventive, it could be moving and provocative too but there were times when I also found it off-puttingly forced or laboured. Translated by Polly Barton.

a book i cant quite place but one im glad i got the chance to read. its short and smart where everything feels relevant and to its point. but allow almost slower moments to the flow to allow you to take it in.
i felt calm at point, listening at other and also a little unsettled. like this was something i wasnt quite grasping or was it our narrator.
again im not quite sure on this book i just know im glad i got the chance to be able to ponder over even that thought. i think at times my struggle most is a i felt "is it me?" am i not clever enough to get this?

I found this short novel enjoyable, although it took me a while to understand what it was about and where it was about. There's a dreamy quality to it, as we follow a young Japanese woman in Göttingen, during Covid, as she meets an old friend and colleague at the train station. Her friend has actually died in 2011 in the earthquake and following tsunami; but he has suddenly returned and is now in Göttingen as well.
There are quite a few more characters, and a truffle dog who keeps unearthing lost objects in the local woods; there's a miniature solar system set up in the streets that seems to move; there are ghosts. There's a lot going on and it can be confusing at times. It comes together at the end, and I enjoyed the characters and the descriptions of their memories.
The translation by Polly Barton is, as always with her translations, impeccable.

An ambitious book about a person's personality unravelling being stretched between reality and imagination. Our Japanese protagonist lives in Germany and struggles with the trauma post a major tsunami event back home in Japan, which caused the disappearance of a close friend, and affected most of her social circle. Now, several years later and in Germany, our protagonist experiences increasingly absurd things, but doesn't seem affected by them as much as by the reappearance of a friend from the old days.

I struggled with this book. I understand it won awards, but it's unclear what for. Maybe post-modern literature is not for me - there is no real structure, no plot, no character development, no beginning middle and end, and no discernible point. It comes across as a book that some people feel should be important and make themselves sound smart for saying they read it, but, when all is said and done, it's not a good book. It might be a good piece of post modern art (arguably), but it's not a good work of literature.

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.

I wanted to love this book, I really did. The synopsis sounded really interesting but it just didn't gel with me. I don't see any point picking it apart, it's well written, it just wasn't for me.

Review not posted anywhere else.

Set during the pandemic, Mai Ishizawa’s prize-winning debut is narrated by an unnamed academic from Tōhoku, whose coastline was hit by a devastating tsunami on March 11th, 2011, now living in Germany to pursue her research.
Our narrator is alerted by a mutual friend that Nomiya will be arriving in Göttingen, walking through streets deserted after the latest bout of covid to meet his train. She accompanies him to his bus along with her roommate’s dog, trained to unearth truffles, later wondering whether Nomiya will go back to Tōhoku for the festival of Obon when the dead return to their families. Nomiya was washed away during the tsunami, but his body has never returned to land. Before long, Hector has begun to unearth small objects rather than truffles, deposited with Ursula, a calm presence at the centre of a wide circle of acquaintances, who tries to reunite them with their owners, some of whom are reluctant to take them back.
Ishizawa was born in Sendai, Tōhoku and now lives in Germany which makes me wonder how much of her own experience she’s poured into this beautiful meditation on trauma, grief and memory. Her novel explores the idea of the embodiment of trauma in both people and places, the pain of not addressing those memories, encompassing war, natural disaster and the pandemic which although not overtly addressed, seems to be the trigger for our narrator’s experience. I found it very moving, its final passages offering hope through acceptance and acknowledgement of the way in which trauma changes us in body and mind. Not an easy book to write about, and I haven’t done it justice, but it’s one that will stay with me for some time.

The Place of Shells is Polly Barton's translation of the Akutagawa Prize winning 貝に続く場所にて by 石沢 麻依 (Mai Ishizawa).

The novel opens in early July 2020 with our first person narrator, a young Japanese woman(*) working on a PhD about the iconography of medieval saints, waiting at Göttingen train station for a visitor from Japan who they have not seen for 9 years.

"Standing in the Shade of the deserted Station, I awaited the arrival of a visitor whose face had half vanished. Whenever I managed to sift through my memories and cobble together some form of resemblance, it would slip apart like water the next moment. Still I would continue, gathering up the little pieces, forcing them inside the outline of a head to create a collaged image. The repetition of this act filled me with a sensation of cowardice, not unlike probing an aching tooth with one’s tongue over and over."

It rapidly becomes clear that their visitor, Nomiya, vanished, presumed swept to sea and drowned, in the Tōhoku earthquake and resulting tsunami on 11 March 2020, a focus for the narrator's meditations, and he is now a ghost, although one taking physical form:

"Nomiya had been in his house in Ishinomaki on that day. The town's fishing port floated in miniature inside the window frame of his second-floor bedroom, the gently breathing sea melding into the scenery of daily life. He had lived alongside it-lived with images of both its quiet and its bleakness forever superimposed in the recesses of his vision. In the time that accumulated inside him, his ears would have stored up the sound of the distant sea like conch shells, and his tactile, olfactory, and other sense memories must also have been interwoven with it."

The story, set to the backdrop of the pandemic, largely takes place over the next month and a half to the Obon festival, where the narrator and her friends speculate Nomiya may return to Japan for the ceremony at his ancestral graves.

The Planetweg, a path that links the city centre to the train station, and out into the forest beyond, with a complete scale model of the solar system with planets placed at appropriate distances, forms a central thread to the story, including the interdetermine state of the Pluto monument, after it is relegated from planetary status, which, in this novel, appears and reappears. Other recurrent images include the sculpture Der Tanz situated close to Jupiter:

"Approaching the place where the road intersected with the main street of the old town, we saw Jupiter. Beyond it, the frozen momentum of the dancers leapt vividly into my eyes, even at this distance. The buildings on either side that I'd always believed to be old were now flitting back and forth through memories, ruining my temporal perspective. The sight of them suddenly wearing the face of another time seemed deliberately designed to tease. We were passing through the portrait of a city that had worn so many different faces, looking at it while remaining unsure if we were appreciating it as a work of art, or witnessing its history. The trio of dancers whirled around energetically, their bodies moving with the fluidity of water and their spinning bronze musculature shining in the sun. The numerous masks that were ripped from their two faces became photographs and postcards in the air-words directed at someone now far away."

When Nomiya introduces the narrator to a fellow Japanese, a physicist at the university, it becomes clear that this is also a visitor from another time, Torahiko Terada (1878-1935), who as a high-school student studied under Natsume Sōseki (whose novel Ten nights of dreams also is a key motif for this book) and who spent 4 months in Göttingen in 1910-1911, although in a letter back to Japan he referred to it by a now old-fashioned use of Kanji rather than Katakana. Terada ended his academic career, after the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, developing the field of earthquake studies, which provides a link back to the event at the novel's core.

"In the Japanese of the past, rather than using the phonetic katakana alphabet to write the names of foreign places as is done now, each locale was assigned its own kanji exonym, which carried a specific meaning, but also conveyed the way it sounded to the ear. [...] In this old schema, Göttingen was written as moon, sink, plain—an open plain into which the moon was sinking. This beautiful, somehow melancholy combination of characters resonated with the Japanese fixations with the moon and with nature. Written in kanji, the name— 月沈原 — carried within it the power to spirit one away to a far-off location. The row of three quiet letters seemed to me both like a mask that the city had worn, and another face of the city woven into the fabric of time."

And this themes of masks and of time slippages is key to the novel, indeed increasingly manifests itself physically at the summer, and the story, progresses, with the different palimpsestic layers of the city over time, including WW2, becoming visible.

"By now, as I was walking around the town, my eyes had grown accustomed to perceiving palimpsests of time."

Another key theme - in a what is a complex but multi-layered novel, concerns the attributes of saints, notably the scallop shell of St. Jacobi:

"St. Jacobi-Kirche was roughly equidistant from Ursula's apartment and the Jupiter post. If your lowered your eyes to the cobbles out the front of the church, you found them dotted with bronze tiles, on whose surface the figure of a golden scallop rose up from a black background. The scallop was both the pilgrim's symbol and St. Jacobi's attribute. In German, scallop is Jakobsmuschel-St. Jacobi's shell, with St. Jacobi being the German name for St. James. The inextricable connection between the shell and the saint was evident both verbally and visually. If an icon wore a hat with a shell on it, you would instantly know it was St. James. This was a pictorial realm where the individual was identified not through their features or their bodily form, but through their attributes."

And the dog owned by one of the narrator's friends, normally trained to hunt truffles, proceeds to unearth other objects from the forest floor, these bring back memories and become personal attributes, for each of those involved.

"We continued walking, like pilgrims of time, pilgrims of memory, though we carried no shells to vouch for our identity as such. All one needed to pass down the Planetenweg was one's own memories, our memory attributes."

A beautifully written palimpsestic meditation on memory, history and loss in the aftermath of the events of 3.11 in 2011.

I enjoyed the commentary on grief and loss and what the author was trying to communicate, although at points it felt like the message was a little muddled. The writing was gorgeous and the descriptions of grief were particularly well written but the overall execution of this novel fell a little short for me.

I found this book about loss and disasters as well as memory to be very profound and sophisticated.
The settings and the writing were excellent too.
Little piece of gem.

Mai Ishizawa’s *The Place of Shells* is a haunting novel about memory, loss, and the lasting impact of disaster. Set in Göttingen, Germany, in 2020, it follows a young Japanese woman who encounters her friend Nomiya—who died in the 2011 tsunami. As reality blurs, eerie events unfold, reflecting the deep grip of trauma and memory. Ishizawa’s poetic, dreamlike writing has been compared to W.G. Sebald and Yoko Tawada. Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, this novel offers a profound meditation on grief, time, and the lingering echoes of the past.