Only those lucky enough to have experienced it know how full of intense sensations and stimuli summer is in Germany: the light, the smells, the buzzing of bees and cars, the laughter coming from open windows and gardens between houses, the flowers bursting out of a patch of land that only a few weeks ago seemed dead…. The German summer – which the Germans waste by flying to the Canaries and Majorca – is not the logical continuation of spring, a season that is always too brief, but a disturbance, a change of plans, an unexpected event that everybody impatiently waits for all year round.

The summer of The Place of Shells, however, is slightly different: it is that of 2020, when another perfectly foreseeable unforeseen event – a pandemic brought about by human disruption of the environment – has led to radical changes in the perception of space and, consequently, of time: the former shrinks into confinement, the latter extends incomprehensibly. People wear masks, faces remain partially hidden, and voices seem to come from a faraway place.

This novel’s narrator also seems to speak from a distance, and this is part of its immediate charm. When Nomiya, an old university classmate from Japan, materializes in the hall of Göttingen train station, the young woman who narrates this book is faced with a new dimension of time: her friend has in fact been dead for nine years. Nomiya, whose “body still hadn’t been found, yet here he was in Göttingen,” was one of the thousands of victims of the tsunami that swept across the east coast of Japan after the earthquake on Friday, March 11, 2011. The unnamed narrator wonders whether her friend’s appearance means that her body will soon be recovered; but the question remains unanswered at the end of the book, when Nomiya’s return to life has already become part of a whole series of miracles.

This novel has no linear plot, however, and makes no effort to create tension with conventional storytelling techniques. In this book, everything important happens in immense spaces between words, over the course of a few weeks when we do not know to what extent Nomiya is aware that he is a character, or even the protagonist, of a ghost story.

Planets

A small monument, named after the Roman god of the underworld, alternately appears and disappears at the edge of the forest. People that died in the world wars return to their humdrum life in Göttingen. A dog digs up objects belonging to both living and dead residents, who start to reclaim them. Smoke from a book-burning of 1933 rises once more into the air. Japanese physicist and writer Torahiko Terada, who lived in Göttingen around 1910, becomes Nomiya’s host, but seems to know as little as anyone about the reason for his return. The narrator grows teeth on her back.

The teeth, a cloak, two breasts on a tray, a lamb with a broken nose and a girl in tow, the effigy of Pluto – these elements function like the attributes of medieval saints. They grant identity to the characters, and in return, that identity is articulated through suffering and mourning. “How should we carry with us the memories of those who had disappeared to the other side of time? Was it a case of endlessly tracing their contours in our memories, until their names were eventually rubbed away, forgotten?” the narrator asks. How we answer this question depends on whether we let the deceased “do their work” in us, as the Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret argues in one of her latest and best books.

For Ishizawa’s narrator, this work of the dead helps to resolve an enigma. Nomiya’s appearance causes the return of a phantom limb, but the reconstruction of what was lost does not erase the anguish caused by the loss. Both Nomiya and her friend, the narrator, need to find a way to inhabit time and space after it has been dislocated by the pandemic and confinement, as well as by the task of mourning for losses past and present.

The Place of the Shells is a novel about this loss, this work, and this enigma. It is also about “how memory carves a path through the natural world,” and how that natural world, with its natural and manmade catastrophes, can become part of our bodies, as physical or invisible attributes, and plunge us into paralysis and confusion because its voice, which now belongs us, still speaks in a foreign language.

This book, translated from the Japanese with great elegance by Polly Barton, suggests a way into re-enchantment with the world. It abolishes the dubious binary terms through which we tend to look at it: natural and artificial, living and dead, animal and human, true and false, past and present. It is a novel of ideas – another debatable category, since, in reality, there are no novels without ideas – but its central appeal lies in the author’s extraordinary ability to convey impressions and sensations with great precision and beauty: the “clunk” of a knife hitting a cutting board, the “firm crust baked to a golden brown” of a cake, the light producing “patterns that sunk all the way to the depths” of a saltwater pool.

One has to get very close to this book to understand the motivations of its characters, which seem like distant planets in their predictable movements that are impossible to decipher at a glance. This book’s appeal lies in its attention to detail and the flashes of shared emotion, as well as in the photographic memory of the author and the love with which she depicts a city like Göttingen, being far more generous with its inhabitants than what they ask for.

Visits

It is widely taken as fact, and therefore rarely debated, that German education is of supreme quality, and its university towns are supremely boring. There is no reason to think that the teaching, though often very good, would be categorically better than in some other countries; whereas for the latter, sometimes all it takes is one foreign student to see all the interesting things they supposedly lack.

For who I was in March 2000, that interest was endless. A record store. A supermarket. The hospital I ended up in after staying awake for a week. The halls of the university. A garden. A cemetery.

All these things existed in Göttingen just as they did in the country I had left, but here they had different names and were freed from the functions they had in the place I came from. I was going to have another name too, as soon as I had found a way to embrace all that otherness and make it my own. That name would be the one my parents had given me some twenty-four years earlier, but from a that point on it was going to refer to a different person – someone who had gone to Göttingen in search of something and found much more than they had hoped for.

The last time I looked around the city, everything was still there, exactly as it is in this novel: the train station, the road where the city walls once stood, the bicycles tangled in the sun, the planetary path, the bookstore, the piano store, the church of Santiago, the spacious library.