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.