The Place of Shells is a quietly devastating and masterfully surreal debut that lingers long after the final page. Originally awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 2021, Mai Ishizawa’s novel arrives in English thanks to the deft translation of Polly Barton, whose delicate rendering allows Ishizawa’s layered prose and elliptical structure to unfold with eerie elegance.

It’s 2020 in Germany. Borders tentatively reopen after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the novel begins in a place of disorientation and distance. A Japanese PhD student reunites with a long-lost friend at a train station. It’s a friend who, by all logic, should not be there, having died nearly a decade earlier in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.

What begins as a ghost story quickly deepens into a haunting meditation on trauma, memory, and the unreliable architecture of reality. Ishizawa does not offer clear answers, nor does she seem particularly interested in drawing lines between what is real and what is imagined. Instead, she plunges the reader into the fractured psyche of our narrator. It’s one undone by grief and the cumulative toll of global and personal disaster.

The prose is spare but resonant, often lyrical in its ambiguity. Barton’s translation captures this beautifully, never overexplaining or flattening Ishizawa’s subtle complexities. The result is a novel that feels like a memory half-remembered—fragile, haunting, and strangely sacred.

The Place of Shells will not be for everyone. It’s elliptical, quiet, and at times disorienting. But 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. And anytime I hear Polly Barton, I know I’m going to enjoy the linguistic journey.

Read The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa here.

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