The Place of Shells
On sale
17th July 2025
Price: £16.99
WINNER OF THE AKUTAGAWA PRIZE
‘This attempt to imprint upon humanity the experiences of the 2011 Tōhoku 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
In the summer of 2020, as Germany slowly emerges from lockdown, a young Japanese woman studying in Göttingen waits at the train station to meet an old friend. Nomiya died a decade earlier in the Tōhoku tsunami, but he has suddenly returned without any explanation.
The reunited friends share a past that’s a world away from the tranquillity of Göttingen. 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.
‘An exquisite, mysterious novel’
Booklist
‘A work of great delicacy’
Jessica Au, author of Cold Enough for Snow
‘This attempt to imprint upon humanity the experiences of the 2011 Tōhoku 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
In the summer of 2020, as Germany slowly emerges from lockdown, a young Japanese woman studying in Göttingen waits at the train station to meet an old friend. Nomiya died a decade earlier in the Tōhoku tsunami, but he has suddenly returned without any explanation.
The reunited friends share a past that’s a world away from the tranquillity of Göttingen. 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.
‘An exquisite, mysterious novel’
Booklist
‘A work of great delicacy’
Jessica Au, author of Cold Enough for Snow
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Reviews
An exquisite, mysterious novel of mourning on a planetary scale.
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
Here we find a form of language that attempts to venture, dancing, into a past enveloped in silence
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 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in a way that only a novel can achieve deserves to be highly esteemed
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
A strange and slim novel of erudition [that] captures the emotional haze in the aftermath of disaster . . . somewhere between W. G. Sebald and Hiromi Kawakami . . . "Trauma," "memory" and "survivor's guilt" are all keywords that could be generically tagged to this book's metadata, but it's much more than the sum of its contents. The intricate writerly prose is a welcome departure from the stilted, often underwritten language ubiquitous in Japanese novels translated into English today. . . . it reads like poetry, or a prayer. The characters keep coming and going, crossing and circling, searching and suffering, living inside the reverberations of history.