Latest news with #MaiIshizawa
Straits Times
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Book review: Mai Ishizawa's The Place Of Shells is a profound debut about grief and loss
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox Mai Ishizawa's The Place Of Shells is a hauntingly profound journey into the emotions associated with death and disaster. By Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton Fiction/Sceptre/Paperback/160 pages/$32.93 Worlds collide in Mai Ishizawa's powerful yet heartbreaking debut, The Place Of Shells, which immediately catapulted her into the literary stratosphere as she scooped up both the Gunzo New Writers' Prize and the prestigious Akutagawa Prize.
Japan Times
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
Grief ebbs and flows between two tragedies in 'The Place of Shells'
'The Place of Shells' by Mai Ishizawa, a strange and slim novel of erudition, captures the emotional haze in the aftermath of disaster. Ishizawa's debut novel, which won one of the three Akutagawa Prizes awarded in 2021, is also her first to be released in English, translated by It takes place in the summer of 2020, in the months following the global outbreak of COVID-19. In 2025, pandemic literature may seem 'too soon,' but 'The Place of Shells' is not an in-your-face book about death and disease, or failed policies and moral panic, but a work of quiet grief and guilt.
