The Metaphors Sustain

Anabelle Johnston reviews Mai Ishizawa’s “The Place of Shells,” translated by Polly Barton.

By Anabelle JohnstonApril 1, 2025

• Fiction

MAI ISHIZAWA’S DEBUT NOVEL, The Place of Shells (2021), newly translated from the original Japanese by Polly Barton, begins quietly. Concretely. The narrator stands in a mostly deserted train station and waits for her friend. Around her, the early July sun oversaturates “the colors of things, while simultaneously returning everything to monochrome,” and the few other patrons sit “at a distance from each other on benches, like stone statues.” An emptiness echoes through the hall and into the page.

As the novel is set amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the specter of social distancing heightens something desultory in its ambience that transcends the social regulations. As her roommate’s truffle dog frolics in a nearby fountain, the narrator attempts to organize her memories of the incoming guest and make sense of the scene before her—an evasive process that fills her with a sense of cowardice, “not unlike probing an aching tooth with one’s tongue over and over.” Even as she describes her surroundings, the narrator speaks displaced across space and time, overlaying the past, present, and spectral.

The novel proceeds in this fashion, at once domestic and otherworldly, intimate yet austere. In summer 2020, a Japanese art history PhD student in Göttingen, Germany, reunites—in a way—with her long-lost friend Nomiya, who disappeared nine years prior during the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. From behind her mask, the narrator converses mechanically with Nomiya’s ghost as they meander through the city and “seams in time.” Her own disorientation compounds as they pass through the various Planetenweg, or planetary paths, that splice the city. Established in 2003 as a means of visually realizing research from the local Max Planck Institute, these bronze posts run a 1:2 billion scale replica of the solar system. The city, primarily known for its intellectual output, makes literal the abstract thoughts of its great minds. Nomiya and the narrator amble past the posts representing the Sun, Mars, and Jupiter, all the way out to a pole representing Pluto.

In the world of the story, where bodies disappear and reappear regardless of scientific stipulations, Pluto, too, has emerged a planet once again—in turn with Nomiya’s arrival. Other members of the community regard the sudden return with suspicion; rumors fester for weeks on end. Loss, individual and collective, remolds the world. Reflecting on the planet’s etymology, the narrator takes its recurrence as a sign that “death, which had grown distant, was reassuming its place alongside us,” and she wades through her memories of grief: “[T]hose who were affected by the deaths that the continuing pandemic was causing; those related to Nomiya who had disappeared into the sea in the catastrophe nine years ago.” The planetary posts, and their stubborn refusal to behave as science would have them, make poignant the narrator’s pain and stumbling through senselessness. For all our research-based predictions, sometimes the sea rises up unexpectedly and swallows the land.

Ishizawa frequently links images of death in this manner, writing fleeting impressions that swirl in an atmosphere of grief: “[T]hose vestiges of lives that had been driven into great mounds of rubble—the vestiges that served to erase all names and all the meanings attaching to things, and the memories that these evoked.” The narrator lingers with the impossibility of articulating loss and the meaninglessness of these fragments that wash up on the shore of time. In her grief, she falls into isolation, concealing her guilt and mourning from herself and others. After a brief phone call with her old friend Sawata, the narrator sits with silence, describing how “meeting with Nomiya had stirred up memories that had been fading away” and left her “stumped at being confronted by these feelings that had no outlet.”

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As The Place of Shells progresses past the initial reunion, other lost people and objects suddenly reappear. Torahiko Terada, a renown and long-dead Japanese physicist and author, joins the narrator and other community members at their mutual friend Ursula’s home. The truffle dog sniffs lost items along the Planetenweg: stuffed animals and toys, a broken basket, a cane, other signs of life interrupted. One night, the narrator awakens to find teeth in her back, teeth she is sure are mere memories “eroded with time.” A physical manifestation of her pain, these do not frighten her or disturb the balance of the world but are, instead, quickly assimilated into the narrative. Agatha, the narrator’s roommate, removes the teeth from her back and proceeds with her day unperturbed. The narrator speculates that “maybe these [teeth] are supposed to be used as an offering to the dead,” before realizing that “these words”—of offering—“didn’t belong to [her] German vocabulary.” Perhaps it is her inability to speak, to recall with clarity and poignancy, that produced these molars. Surrealism may be the natural endpoint to temporal and geographic severance; Ishizawa’s narrative certainly suggests this as one of the few means of reckoning with mass destruction and regaining intimacy with the past.    

If the novel feels like it is grasping for language, it is by design. Ishizawa frequently draws out the distinction between Japanese kanji and German, now for English-speaking audiences, with linguistic twists that recall Yoko Tawada’s otherworldly wordplay. (Tawada won the Akutagawa Prize in 1993 and Ishizawa in 2021.) Göttingen, offered by Ishizawa in traditional kanji as 月沈原—“moon, sink, plain” as opposed to the modern phonetic “katakana”—suggests a certain saturnalia. Of Nomiya’s use of this historic system, the narrator remarks, “Written in kanji, the name—月沈原—carried within it the power to spirit one away to a far-off location.” When a young girl recounts a story in which a Japanese woman mistakes “strawberry” for “earthquake” due to the phonetic similarity in German, the narrator notes that even an abstract word can return the “physical sensations of a far-off land” to her, bestowing words with an embodied, enactory power.

The Place of Shells inhabits the crusted border between words and embodied experiences, particularly when registering mass trauma. For the narrator, images of destruction in Japan, dug up by the terms “war,” “air-raid,” and “volcanic eruption,” feel impossibly disconnected from her immediate environment and, as she spends more time abroad, herself. She insists upon these articulations of violence with a sense of duty and responsibility toward Japan, such that language itself is treated as a border between nations and a passageway to collective memory. Just as online images of the battered coastline collected from the internet supplant her personal recollection, the narrator also draws on fiction to attempt the impossible task of making sense of mass destruction. Even if these fragments of history may only “create impressions, not memories,” the narrator combs through the “anonymous reports, photographs, and videos” with urgency, refusing to let “words about regeneration and reconstruction” further desecrate the unwinding past. Ishizawa leaves the details of this reconstruction intentionally vague, impossible to fully articulate or visualize, thereby suspending the reader in the narrator’s longing for answers.

The narrator is not alone in her unreality. Prolonged physical and emotional disintegration is a frequent thematic hallmark of Japanese 3/11 literature, a loose genre of texts written in the aftermath of the natural disaster and subsequent Fukushima nuclear meltdown. The tragedy is often considered the most devastating nuclear event since the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki just a half century prior, continuously unfolding beyond the major structural damage to three northeast prefectures. Comparing 3/11 to the atomic bombs, many Japanese writers publicly discussed the incident and literary response at the symposium “Ecrire après la Catastrophe” (Writing After the Disaster) hosted at the French Salon du Livre the following year. While some of the emerging works addressed 3/11 directly, such as Hideo Furukawa’s Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima (2011), others transformed the event to dramatize the vagueness of not-knowing, like Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013). In works such as The Emissary (2014) and her short story “The Island of Eternal Life” (2012), Yoko Tawada unspools dystopic phantoms of Fukushima, writing of the disorder thrust upon bodies and borders by nuclear fallout, without quite naming the disaster itself. Perhaps most famous in the Anglophone world is Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being, which invokes the disaster from across the ocean—through a magical diary tangled in debris—and arguably catapulted 3/11 into the global cultural consciousness as an incident of environmental and nuclear catastrophe that may forecast our collective fate.

Many of these texts dwell in moments before the meltdown, revisiting either through depressed memory or atmospheric time travel. Loss, both directly related to 3/11 and inferred, is often inarticulable and unresolved. Recurring speculative elements allow characters across texts to contend with the unreality of mass destruction by bending reality to meet the devastation. Whether allegorical or up-front, these works do not submit to apocalyptic nihilism nor governmental cover-up. The literature of 3/11 insists upon physical disorientation, interruptions in linear narrative, and bodies in pain, out of proportion, out of time. Even without recourse for the pain, there is still purpose in living, in constant recollection; the body in decay serves as an indefinite reminder. Glancing up from the rubble, these texts ask how to live with an uncertain future, how to endure constant incursions from the past.

In Ishizawa’s world, the train station transforms to reflect its stature before it was bombed during World War II, the public memory of destruction past overlaid with chaos present. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator stands with her friends, Mr. Terada, and other members of the community, watching as it morphs, like a scene that “had another layer underneath, like pencil markings from a draft that still showed through on the paper, and this one was full of sparkling metal.” Even as the image is left uncertain, never clarified but allowed to remain primarily as a cluster of sensation, Ishizawa evokes the feeling grasping for something irretrievable. As the narrator walks again through the planet path, unsteady time slips to reveal each “if only,” the wistful near misses that each character safeguards. Rather than attempting to speak directly to the pain, Ishizawa joins legions of writers who pay respects to the enormity by weaving language around it.

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Late in the novel, the narrator reflects on the vast gulf of experience she has amassed after Nomiya’s passing. “What I had been afraid of,” she muses, “was the distortions of memory caused by emotions and the passage of time. That was where forgetting began. […] All along, it hadn’t been about the pain of the memories, but the guilt I felt for my distance from them.”

In this manner, Ishizawa—whose personal biography greatly mirrors the narrator’s—traverses the boundary between public and private memory, enduring and letting go. Instances of pain surface in the narrator’s consciousness as prompted by her environment: the sea crashing in on Fukushima, the hours dwindling outside the grocery store under social distancing mandates, the living in isolation and fear. 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. As he fumbles around for the words to describe Nomiya, Sawata articulates to the narrator how “stacking up metaphors and images is the only way we have of describing him, because that’s the least painful way of thinking about him.” True, yes—but in Ishizawa’s deft hand, the metaphors sustain even as language fails.