spoke

Felt I was primed to respond to this one: overtly literary (published in America by New Directions) with significant speculative elements, strong sense of place in the university city of Göttingen, themes of memory and haunting, even a touch of climate (geology?) fiction through its focus on the 2011 Japanese tsunami. Not to mention the Planetenweg. I mean, have a look at these blurbs:

"An exquisite, mysterious novel of mourning on a planetary scale." — Booklist

"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."
— Jessica Au

"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."
— Jenny Mustard

The premise: "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." She takes this very much in stride – or at least finds herself unable to speak about it or directly acknowledge its strangeness – but then more intrusions from the past begin to appear across the city...

What's interesting is how my genre expectations led me astray, because ultimately in its resolution I felt that Place of Shells was much more in the tradition of Japanese "healing fiction," along the lines of What You Are Looking For Is in the Library. In a way it's a social-harmony-restored novel. For me that didn't work, but I often feel that I'm reading Japanese literature in slightly the wrong key, or at least without sufficient genre context.

Although the novel addresses the Holocaust, and in a way uses mentions of the Holocaust to strengthen its themes around memory, loss and haunting, it is definitely not about the Holocaust. It would be a bit churlish to object to that: this is a Japanese novel set abroad, rather than one about Germany's past. But having been reminded by the Wikipedia article about the city that Leó Szilárd and Edward Teller were on the faculty at the university before the Nazis came to power, it strikes me that this could have been a bigger book (it's very slight), perhaps in conversation with When We Cease to Understand the World, or at least with the metaphorical tsunami of the atomic bomb and its impact on Japan. Author missed a trick, perhaps?

In summary: I've never read a book that was so strongly in the tradition of WG Sebald while at the same time being so completely unlike WG Sebald. Which fascinates me.

Review by Glynne Walley
Review by Anabelle Johnston in LARB