The Place of Shells - Ishizawa Mai

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The Place of Shells

by
Ishizawa Mai

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	The Place of Shells
Author:	Ishizawa Mai
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2021 (Eng. 2025)
Length:	135 pages
Original in:	Japanese
Availability:	The Place of Shells - US
	The Place of Shells - UK
	The Place of Shells - Canada

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

Japanese title: 貝に続く場所にて
Translated by Polly Barton
Akutagawa Prize, 2021 (I)

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Our Assessment:

B+ : overwrought but impressive

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Publishers Weekly	.	13/11/2024	.

From the Reviews:

"(S)olemn if nebulous (.....) Though the story’s dreamy lyricism sometimes slips into imprecision (...), Ishizawa sustains an incantatory mood, and she offers plenty of bewitching descriptions of artworks. This has its moments." - Publishers Weekly

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

The narrator of The Place of Shells is a Japanese student working on her PhD in Art History in Germany, at the University of Göttingen. She has been here since 2017; the novel is set in the summer of 2020, and begins with her waiting at the train station for an old acquaintance from Japan, Nomiya, to arrive. Nomiya had studied Art History in Japan at the same university where the narrator got her MA. She remembers a conversation they had early in 2011, about what he might write his final-year undergraduate dissertation on -- but: "Less than two weeks later, he was swallowed up by the sea", one of the thousands who died in the tsunami that came in the wake of the Tōhoku earthquake.
So who does the narrator meet ? Well, she describes him as a ghost, and questions his corporeality throughout -- and yet he seems real enough. So, for example, when she meets him:

I felt a sense of relief to see the solidity of the form he took -- solid enough, in fact, that the sun didn't shine through him. He may have been dead, but he still cast a shadow at his feet.

And he settles in Göttingen, taking German lessons, interacting with others -- like any other person ..... As bizarre as it is, the narrator treats the state of his being matter-of-factly, just another aspect of their present-day interactions -- noting, for example, that she never addressed "that day of severance" with him, his death and the events that led to it, and:

The reason it was left unsaid wasn't because I was living and he was dead. Rather, it was because of this indirectness of my stance, my sense of distance from the sea and the nuclear power plant. My perspective lay perpetually outside of the frame.

Nomiya is not even the only spectral presence in the novel: in an e-mail he sends the narrator he mentions meeting: "a Japanese man called Mr.Terada at my German teacher's house. He's a physicist". The narrator notes that: "Each time I read over his words, I couldn't shake off the sense of a temporal rift separating us" -- suggested also by Nomiya's old-style Japanese spelling of 'Göttingen', using kanji (月沈原), rather than the modern-day day phonetic katakana spelling (ゲッティンゲン), and Terada is of that different time (and also place): he is Torahiko Terada, who: "had spent abut four months in Göttingen -- or rather, in 月沈原 -- between October 1910 and February 1911". (Terada is a real-life historical figure; he had been a student of Natsume Sōseki's -- and had sent him: "a letter entitled 'From Göttingen' -- where the name of the city transliterated into the Japanese language in yet another way to how it now was: Gecchingen".)
This novel is full of both temporal and physical displacement and overlap: the past here is not (only) past, but rears up in the present in a variety of forms. When the narrator describes being unable to " shake the sense of a temporal rift" she continues:

This wasn't by anything as simple as Nomiya being a ghost -- rather, the ghost seemed to be the scenes of the city summoned between his words.

The narrator frequently describes movement and location in relation to the Planetenweg Göttingen, with its markers, scale models of the planetary system -- overlaying the solar system on the city-plan. Indeed, the city itself figures prominently in the novel in this and several other ways -- including when:

If the issue in the forest was spatial in nature, then the focus in the city to the west was temporal. Fragments of the past had started popping up in town.

And:

Like a multiple-exposure photograph, the city was projecting its memories onto itself. yet these scraps of memories were also diluted, like an inferior mirage.

       Memories are also internal and internalized -- "Different parts of my body stored up memories, which they silently retained" -- while in the forest the dog of the narrator's roommate starts unearthing all sorts of "odd and out-of-place objects", with Ursula, an acquaintance, making a whole library out of them, with people coming to claim them. And, at one point, the narrator finds teeth growing on her back -- her roommate reässuring her: "It's nothing serious. It's not a mouth, it's just teeth. It's a very mild case". And, in this memory-tale, even madeleines figure, the narrator and her roommate baking some -- but when she tastes one: "my memories weren't roused in the slightest -- they didn't stir from their hazy slumber, didn't yield a single association".
       There are many more overlapping layers to the novel, from hagiography (the subject of the narrator's doctoral thesis is in the: "representations of the Fourteen Holy Helpers in Germany from the Middle Ages onward") to the shells of the title to Japanese festivals (in contrast also to German ones), along with Covid still in the air. Ishizawa's is a very creative approach to dealing with trauma, catastrophe, death, and, especially, memory -- very effectively overlaying past (and great distances) on the localized here and now.
       The Place of Shells is overwrought -- not least in the writing (gamely translated by Polly Barton), as with the madeleines, where: "Disguised as a fragrant spice, the thorn of irony had slipped in amid the sweet smell of the cakes". One has to make allowances -- for the language (much of which even in the original was surely similarly stylized), as well as for the curious way of seeing presented here so earnestly. But the novel also works because of this -- not least, because Ishizawa has her narrator simply relate what she encounters and feels, without questioning the bizarreness of so much of it. Yes, she thinks it's strange -- but no more so than much of what a stranger living in a foreign city might find odd.
       The Place of Shells is a demanding read, in the sense that readers have to be willing to go along with it, on Ishizawa's terms -- and these are not the ones of your usual fiction. If one can manage that, there are considerable rewards to this very unusual work of fiction.

- M.A.Orthofer, 4 January 2025

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Links:

The Place of Shells:

New Durections publicity page
Kodansha publicity page

Reviews:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Japanese literature
Index of Akutagawa Prize-winning works under review

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About the Author:

Japanese author Ishizawa Mai (石沢麻依) was borni in 1980.

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