The Place Of Shells: A profound debut about grief and loss

Worlds collide in Mai Ishizawa's powerful yet heartbreaking debut, The Place Of Shells, which immediately catapulted her into the literary stratosphere as she scooped up both the Gunzo New Writers' Prize and the prestigious Akutagawa Prize.

- Walter Sim

First published in Japanese in 2021 and tenderly translated by Polly Barton, it is a hauntingly profound journey into the emotions associated with death and disaster—trauma, survivor's guilt, loss and closure.

The unnamed first-person narrator might well be Ishizawa herself, the author born in coastal Sendai in north-eastern Japan and now residing in Germany.

Ishizawa does not shy away from the raw, visceral impact of collective and personal tragedy in this story set in 2020 in the German university town of Gottingen.

Grief and discomfort lurk at every corner as she weaves together two recent tragedies—the Covid-19 pandemic and the March 11, 2011 Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.

The latter catastrophe devastated vast expanses of north-east Japan, including Sendai, with coastal communities washed out to sea by monster waves. The tsunami caused over 90 per cent of the 19,775 fatalities; another 2,550 people remain missing.

The story flits through space and time, through the power of memory, between Sendai in 2011 and Gottingen in 2020.