“The Place of Shells” by Mai Ishizawa, a strange and slim novel of erudition, captures the emotional haze in the aftermath of disaster.
Ishizawa’s debut novel, which won one of the three Akutagawa Prizes awarded in 2021, is also her first to be released in English, translated by Polly Barton.
It takes place in the summer of 2020, in the months following the global outbreak of COVID-19. In 2025, pandemic literature may seem “too soon,” but “The Place of Shells” is not an in-your-face book about death and disease, or failed policies and moral panic, but a work of quiet grief and guilt.
