The Place of Shells

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.

At once domestic and otherworldly, intimate yet austere . . . for a slim novel, Ishizawa sweeps across tragedies of personal and global order. Gratifyingly, the novel does so without veering into cliches; while it makes many generalities about the nature of remembrance and grief, Ishizawa evades sentimentality. Her language remains precise and piercing amid the absurd: the stilted nature of certain phrases, the repetition of both imagery and feeling.

Like a memory, this book does not lose the quality of pain and loss, which captures everything that is shaky and incomprehensible

A quietly devastating and masterfully surreal debut that lingers long after the final page . . . a novel that feels like a memory half-remembered - fragile, haunting, and strangely sacred . . . for readers willing to surrender to its tide, Ishizawa offers something extraordinary. It's a literary experience that captures the ghostly weight of loss, and the way our minds attempt to piece together meaning when the world falls apart.

In Mai Ishizawa's extraordinary, beautiful novel, place and the present are filled with time: she shows us how we can migrate into a past and how our own pasts migrate with us, how we carry scraps of them wherever we go.