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Mai Ishizawa was born in 1980 in Sendai City, Japan, and currently lives in Germany. Her debut novel, The Place of Shells, won the Akutagawa Prize.
An exquisite, mysterious novel of mourning on a planetary scale. * Booklist * A work of great delicacy and seriousness. Ishizawa anchors the temporal and the ghostly with a transfixing pragmatism, and the result is a shifting, tessellated kaleidoscope of memory, architecture, history and grief -- Jessica Au, author of <i>Cold Enough for Snow</i> Here we find a form of language that attempts to venture, dancing, into a past enveloped in silence -- Yoko Tawada, author of <i>The Last Children of Tokyo</i> Missing persons and dogs, the dead and the living, are all on an even footing, interacting with equality. The multilayered intertwining of their memories saw me several times losing my perspective and growing dizzy, and the next thing I knew, I had been dragged into even deeper territory than I was expecting. This attempt to imprint upon humanity the experiences of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in a way that only a novel can achieve deserves to be highly esteemed -- Yoko Ogawa, author of <i>The Memory Police</i> The Place of Shells is a meditation on art, death, and belonging. It reads like an eerie, shimmering fever dream where the boundaries between past and present, reality and fantasy, life and death often shatter. A strange and beautiful memento mori of a novel -- Jenny Mustard, author of <What a Time to Be Alive</i> A strange and slim novel of erudition [that] captures the emotional haze in the aftermath of disaster . . . somewhere between W. G. Sebald and Hiromi Kawakami . . . ""Trauma,"" ""memory"" and ""survivor's guilt"" are all keywords that could be generically tagged to this book's metadata, but it's much more than the sum of its contents. The intricate writerly prose is a welcome departure from the stilted, often underwritten language ubiquitous in Japanese novels translated into English today. . . . it reads like poetry, or a prayer. The characters keep coming and going, crossing and circling, searching and suffering, living inside the reverberations of history. * Japan Times *
