The Place of Shells

“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“The characters in Mai Ishizawa’s The Place of Shells have all, it seems, come to understand that there is no ‘regular’ course of the world, that calamity and disaster are part of its recurrent processes, that we must constantly mourn and repair and make sense of that which lacks sense.” – Dante Silva - The Brooklyn Rail“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”“The Place of Shells is a meditation on art, death, and belonging. It reads like an eerie, shimmering fever dream where the boundaries between past and present, reality and fantasy, life and death often shatter. A strange and beautiful memento mori of a novel”” – Jenny Mustard, author of Okay Days“The Place of Shells inhabits the crusted border between words and embodied experiences, particularly when registering mass trauma. Ishizawa—whose personal biography greatly mirrors the narrator’s—traverses the boundary between public and private memory, enduring and letting go.” – Anabelle Johnston - Los Angeles Review of Books“This book, translated from the Japanese with great elegance by Polly Barton, suggests a way into re-enchantment with the world… its central appeal lies in the author’s extraordinary ability to convey impressions and sensations with great precision and beauty.” – Patricio Pron - The Berlin Review” Ishizawa’s poetic prose embraces art along with both Japanese and German culture, and her novel becomes a hypnotic dissection of memory, trauma and belonging that many will relate to. Though face masks make a regular appearance, the narrative comes across as timeless, perhaps because the story seems suspended in a timeline of its own.” – Zuzanna Lachendro - New Statesman“Memory and grief engage in a complicated pas de deux in Mai Ishizawa’s captivating debut novel… In an intricate web of symbols and motifs, Ishizawa shows how metaphorical and magical thinking help us cope with the inevitable losses triggered by forgetting.” – Tess Lewis - Artsfuse

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.