The Place of Shells

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. As soon as he arrives, she guides him through the city, showing him Göttingen's scale model of the solar system and talking about her PhD studies, her roommate, and their mutual friends. Yet it isn't long before his spectral presence in the city begins to fray the narrator's psyche and destabilize the world around them: eerie objects are found in the forest, the model of Pluto begins disappearing and reappearing, and threads in the fabric of time start unraveling. The narrative continues to spiral and unfold, with the presence of death ever lingering.

Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, The Place of Shells is a hypnotic, poetic novel that explores the ebb and flow of memory—its physical manifestations, its sudden detours—and the overwhelming stranglehold of trauma.