A Japanese art history grad student in the German university town of Göttingen heads to the train station in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic to meet an unusual visitor: Nomiya, an old college acquaintance, who happens to have been dead for nearly a decade after being swept away in the catastrophic Tōhoku tsunami.
His spectral apparition doesn’t provide an expected narrative impulse: this is no ghost story, but rather a loose meditative journey through the narrator’s psyche. There’s startlingly little concern with the mechanics of Nomiya’s apparent resurrection, and as he builds a new life in Göttingen he mostly seems real enough (no floating through walls, no attempted hauntings).
His ghostliness manifests as psychodrama, as the narrator struggles to comprehend how this “castaway from the past spread through my mind like a bleeding stain”. She questions her own feelings, but rarely the bizarre, unprecedented and seemingly impossible events surrounding her. The prose – in Polly Barton’s translation from Japanese – is meandering and poetic, dotted with some lovely passages but can be overwrought.
- The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa is available now from New Directions, details.
