The Brooklyn Rail

Memory is, in Mai Ishizawa’s The Place of Shells, fraught. It “assumes masks,” is made strange and awful, a “ravaged visage” severed from place and personhood. What is the source of the fracture?

It is 2020, the pandemic, and the narrator finds herself in Göttingen, Germany. She is from Sendai, Japan, the site of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami (catastrophe, it seems, abounds). It is in Göttingen’s center that she meets Nomiya, a character who, as he appears, reminds the narrator of the “stained-glass renditions of saints” in churches. He has a religious presence, referred to throughout the novel as saintlike, a “pilgrim.” The comparisons are appropriate. Nomiya and the narrator are both students of medieval religious art, its crude and lurid colors, awkward forms. He comes to Göttingen having studied alongside the narrator in Japan; the two are reintroduced through a mutual acquaintance. Nomiya is also, we come to find, dead, “swallowed up by the sea” in the Tōhoku tsunami. 

The distinction is a troubled one. Ishizawa does not accept “dead” and “alive” as separate conditions, severed from one another. There are “unfortunate lodgers, resident ghosts” that return, rude and alive, to the world she crafts. The logic is uncertain, left to the reader’s imagination—I surrendered as the narrative became more surreal still, recalling the words of the poet Dorothea Lasky, “When people tell me ghosts don’t exist, I get bored.” The apparitions continue to appear, one of whom is Terada Torahiko, the renowned physicist and poet (who saw both pursuits, as Ishizawa does, as parts of a singular practice). Ishizawa’s description of his prose could double as a description of her own, a series of gestures: “waiting for the surface of a pool of water to grow calm, reaching a hand into it, and scooping up a section of the mirror that had formed on its surface.” 

Though the surface in The Place of Shells, first troubled by Nomiya’s return, is more volatile. Nomiya reminds the narrator of her past, and the plot comes to resemble her psyche—both start to splinter. Such are the novel’s preoccupations. How does the past interrupt the present? How can the characters reach, if not relief, some sort of solace?

The New York Times, reporting on the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, wrote of “scenes of desperation,” the language of “assault” and “annihilation.” Ishizawa’s characters remember those scenes, if at all, as an “accumulation of fragments.” Consider the recollections of Sawata, an acquaintance of the narrator’s: “He found that the objects littering the area had lost their form, lost sight of their original usage, lost any connection to the people who had used them, begun to lose even their names.” His memories become, the same as the landscape, somewhat absurd—perverse combinations of objects and places. 

The narrator searches for a “definitive distinction between there and here,” and is disappointed. The aftershocks of Tōhoku are diffuse, and continue to disrupt her place in the world, no matter the distance. Göttingen is, the same as home, saturated with absence. Still, the narrator is reserved (hers is a religious and contemplative disposition), not reactive. The world is volatile and idiotic; she is not. The characters have all, it seems, come to understand that there is no “regular” course of the world, that calamity and disaster are part of its recurrent processes, that we must constantly mourn and repair and make sense of that which lacks sense. 

Is that not also the surrealist imperative? To present the world not as a cohesive whole, but the chaos of its constituent parts?

The plot starts to lean further into the nonsensical. It becomes a strange parabola, or perhaps a poem, with resonant motifs and images. A model of Pluto, part of a series of planetary models in Göttingen, disappears. It returns moments later, “metallic” and “heavenly,” just to disappear again—the disappearances coincide with the apparitions (“death. . . was reassuming its place alongside us”). The symbolism is blunt (Pluto, lord of the dead), and becomes blunter still. The peripheral characters are all named for saints, and start to receive the icons of their namesakes. Agatha, the narrator’s roommate, receives a pair of severed breasts on a plate, reminiscent of Saint Agatha, whose breasts were forcibly removed (Agatha’s mother has breast cancer). 

It reminded me of W. G. Sebald, of course, the tradition of novelized historical work—The Place of Shells could be read as a novelistic excavation of the earthquake’s ruins, though to do so would be to disregard its strangeness. I was also reminded of the manga Uzumaki, the speculative visions of Leonora Carrington, the recent and more mycelial work of Björk (mycelium appears throughout the novel). Ishizawa also references Natsume Sōseki, thought of as a father of Japanese modernism, in a discussion of his Ten Nights of Dreams. 

The concluding scene is referred to, by Terada, as the “eleventh dream” of Sōseki’s. The characters all make a “pilgrimage” to the Pluto post. The landscape has become a dreamscape (or something more nightmarish, for some), contoured by the characters’ memories. It is a morose procession, in communion with saints and spirits and other conduits. I was reminded of André Breton’s instructions in his “Manifesto of Surrealism,” to put yourself in “as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can.” (Breton also saw disaster, the shards of the real, in the First World War.) I watched, with pleasure, the carnival. 

Have the characters been exalted, become saints? The narrator remarks, “I found myself incapable of explaining anything at all.”