Oct. 27th, 2025 11:14 pm
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skygiantsSpeaking of literary sff about how humans project out their loss and grief, Mai Ishizawa's The Place of Shells is sort of the opposite of Luminous -- where Luminous sprawls out into big branching intersecting plotlines and detailed, evocative worldbuilding, The Place of Shells spirals in on itself, carefully layering its metaphors on top of each other as the world echoes its protagonist's own interiority.
The unnamed narrator is a Japanese PhD student studying medieval saints in Göttingen, Germany, in the summer of 2020. The first quarantine regulations are just beginning to relax, and, as the world opens up a little bit again, she's visited by her old grad school friend Nomiya, who unfortunately died in the 2011 tsunami, and whose body was never recovered. The meeting is, inevitably, a bit awkward, mostly small talk -- it's hard to make a connection after nine years, especially when one person has been changing and moving through the world and the other has not -- but Nomiya seems to be enjoying Göttingen. He decides to stay for some time. The narrator feels that it would be rude to ask him whether he's going to return home to Japan for the Ghost Festival.
As the summer unfurls, in a series of encounters and re-encounters with friends new and old, the city of Göttingen gets stranger. The planet Pluto, which was removed from Göttingen's scale-model planet-themed walking trail some time ago, keeps intermittently re-appearing. The narrator's roommate keeps taking her dog out to look for truffles and instead the dog finds strange lost objects, all of which seem to have profound significance to somebody. Nomiya comes to dinner with the narrator's old grad school advisor and brings a friend, a nice man who appears to be experiencing the city from approximately a century previous. In fact, time is slipping all over Göttingen: and what is time, or memory, except something that lives in a landmark or an object? The narrator studies medieval saints. She understands things in terms of iconography.
I picked this up largely because it was translated by Polly Barton, who also translated Where The Wild Ladies Are and Butter (post on which forthcoming) and at this point I've decided I should probably just read everything she translates because it's clearly going to take me interesting places. This book, absolutely another data point of reinforcement.
The unnamed narrator is a Japanese PhD student studying medieval saints in Göttingen, Germany, in the summer of 2020. The first quarantine regulations are just beginning to relax, and, as the world opens up a little bit again, she's visited by her old grad school friend Nomiya, who unfortunately died in the 2011 tsunami, and whose body was never recovered. The meeting is, inevitably, a bit awkward, mostly small talk -- it's hard to make a connection after nine years, especially when one person has been changing and moving through the world and the other has not -- but Nomiya seems to be enjoying Göttingen. He decides to stay for some time. The narrator feels that it would be rude to ask him whether he's going to return home to Japan for the Ghost Festival.
As the summer unfurls, in a series of encounters and re-encounters with friends new and old, the city of Göttingen gets stranger. The planet Pluto, which was removed from Göttingen's scale-model planet-themed walking trail some time ago, keeps intermittently re-appearing. The narrator's roommate keeps taking her dog out to look for truffles and instead the dog finds strange lost objects, all of which seem to have profound significance to somebody. Nomiya comes to dinner with the narrator's old grad school advisor and brings a friend, a nice man who appears to be experiencing the city from approximately a century previous. In fact, time is slipping all over Göttingen: and what is time, or memory, except something that lives in a landmark or an object? The narrator studies medieval saints. She understands things in terms of iconography.
I picked this up largely because it was translated by Polly Barton, who also translated Where The Wild Ladies Are and Butter (post on which forthcoming) and at this point I've decided I should probably just read everything she translates because it's clearly going to take me interesting places. This book, absolutely another data point of reinforcement.
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