Mai Ishizawa

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The Place of Shells

Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, a masterful novel about loss and memory in the aftermath of a horrifying ecological disaster

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 Goettingen 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 Goettingen. 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.