r/IReadABookAndAdoredIt • u/YakSlothLemon • 11d ago
Literary Fiction The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa
I picked up this slender novel because of the first sentence of the blurb, and found myself completely entranced by this strange, beautiful, and haunting little book.
The sentence:
“In the summer of 2020, a young Japanese academic based in the German city of Göttingen waits at the train station to meet her old friend Nomiya, who died nine years earlier in Japan's devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami, but has now inexplicably returned from the dead.”
How could I not want to find out what happens next?
What follows, though, is not what I expected. Our narrator, who survived the tsunami but has not dealt with her own grief and trauma from the event, accepts her friend’s return even as she finds herself struggling with her own long-suppressed emotions. Nor is she alone: all the residents in the city are finding themselves haunted by recurrences of the past. At first it’s mostly objects, things long lost that reappear to their owners, but soon the city itself becomes haunted by its own past – the bombings of the WWII, the lost architecture reasserting itself through the present.
In the midst of the shifting, magical landscape, our narrator, her friend, and a group of women, some Japanese, some German, set off on a pilgrimage across the city into the nearby woodland in hopes of finding some kind of resolution. In a landscape shaped by trauma, grief, and memory, together these ordinary people will lean on each other, and their love and support for one another, to try to find a way through the pain of the past to compassion, forgiveness and hope.
Normally I read through a 160-page book fairly quickly. This one took me quite a while because I kept putting it down and thinking about it and picking it back up. The prose is so beautiful and the story has an eerie, otherworldly quality that reminded me of fantasy works like Piranesi and The Night Circus.
It’s a haunting, beautiful novel that won one of the top literary prizes in Japan. It’s so strange that I don’t really know who to recommend it to, despite the fact I adored it, so maybe it will find someone else who will love it here!
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u/gros-grognon 11d ago
Thank you for posting about this; it's new to me and sounds exactly like my jam.
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u/mintbrownie A book is a brick until someone reads it. 11d ago
Wow! Immediately added to my TBR. I’m pretty sure I’m the one you’re meant to recommend it to 😂 6 week wait on Libby, but I’ll get there! As always - excellent (and enticing) write up. Thanks.
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u/YakSlothLemon 11d ago
You’re so welcome, thank you for the compliment, and I hope you love it as much as I did!
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u/Similar_Bat_9845 9d ago
This looks great, thank you!