The Place of Shells

Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, a masterful novel about loss and memory in the aftermath of a horrifying ecological disaster
In the summer of 2020, as Europe is beginning to open back up after the f ...

Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, a masterful novel about loss and memory in the aftermath of a horrifying ecological disaster
In the summer of 2020, as Europe is beginning to open back up after the first phase of the pandemic, a young Japanese woman based in the German city of Göttingen is working on a PhD about the iconography of medieval saints. She waits at the train station to meet her old friend from graduate school, Nomiya, who died nine years earlier in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan, but has suddenly reemerged without any explanation.
When Nomiya arrives, the nar