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 G�ttingen 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 G�ttingen’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.

About the Authors

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 literary translator from the Japanese. Her translations include Butter by Asako Yuzuki and Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa. She has published two works of non-fiction, Fifty Sounds and Porn: An Oral History; What Am I, A Deer? is her debut novel.

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