Ishizawa Mai 石沢麻依. Kai ni tsuzuku basho nite 貝に続く場所にて. Kōdansha, 2021.
This tied for the 165th Akutagawa Prize, for early 2021. The author was born in 1980, and this seems to be her first published work. It’s set during the time of the Covid, and its timeliness is no doubt part of what brought it the Prize; but by the end it’s not clear how big a part Covid actually plays in the story. It’s a catalyst, if even that, for what’s really a meditation on the Tōhoku earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster ten years on.
The author was raised in Sendai, studied Western art history at Tōhoku University, and is now pursuing a PhD in same in Germany; thus far the narrator’s life seems to mirror the author’s own. The narrator (her name is mentioned once, but write-ups of the book seem to miss it, so let’s just follow their lead and talk about her anonymously) is a Sendai native now pursuing a PhD in renaissance art in Göttingen, Germany. The narrator is also a survivor of the 3/11 disaster, and much of the story is about her memories of it, which come back to her with a new urgency (and concreteness) in the summer of 2020.
The story is set in the midst of Europe’s tentative reopening after the spring lockdown; people are out and about again, gathering in small groups, but still wearing masks, and still evidently traumatized by the ongoing public health disaster. Although it’s not made explicit, this seems to be what triggers the narrator’s confrontation with her 3/11 memories. Memories: that’s the big theme of the story, but while a confrontation of sorts is happening, the terms of it are unclear and the narrator only achieves the most tentative of resolutions, if that.
The unclarity comes because the story is told almost entirely in terms of several elaborate and overlapping webs of symbols. This nearly allegorical narrative approach (strangely appropriate for a character whose specialty is renaissance religious art) is both the work’s strength and its weakness.
The story itself is relatively simple, if not straightforward. In the summer after the lockdown, the narrator is visited in Göttingen by an old friend from Sendai. This friend, Nomiya, is someone the narrator had long thought was dead – his house was washed away, and his entirely family disappeared. Some of their bodies had been found, but not Nomiya’s; the narrator had concluded he was dead, but lacked what most people would call a sense of closure. Now he reappears, with no explanation, and comes to spend time in Göttingen, as he too is researching German art. The story explores the narrator’s gradual coming to terms with her memories of him and his reappearance.
Except: it’s not clear if he’s really back. From the start the narrator refers to him as a ghost, even though people around him seem to see him and accept his reality. And as time goes by more and more figures from the past – some from the distant past – begin to appear in the present, and the reader comes to perceive Nomiya as, if not a ghost per se, then a manifestation of memory. And he’s not the only one. While in Göttingen Nomiya befriends another Japanese expatriate, Terada, and after a while it becomes clear this is Terada Torahiko 寺田寅彦 (1878-1935), a minor literary figure who had also studied in Germany over a century before.
In other words, what starts as a realistic enough narrative gradually moves into more and more surreal territory, with Nomiya and Terada both walking and talking and eating cheese tortes along with the narrator’s living, present-day friends. But these friends, an array of German women of different ages and walks of life, gradually lose their reality in the reader’s eyes as they get absorbed into the surreal narrative and the author’s complicate networks of symbols.
There are several such networks. One has to do with the planets. Göttingen boasts a planetenweg or Planet Path, a scale model of the solar system laid out through the town (for my UO readers, it sounds like a more elaborate equivalent of the one in Alton Baker Park), and the narrator invariably describes the town’s geography in terms of the planets and their imaginary orbits; this in turn associates the other characters with the planets they live closest to. Nomiya, for example, is associated with Pluto – appropriately, the god of the underworld (and associations with the Bon festival are suggested as well).
The other has to do with saints. The narrator’s research makes her more aware than most of the saints and their iconography, and by the end of the story we realize that all the German women in her life have saints’ names and are associated with their namesakes’ iconography. Her roommate Agatha, for example; her mother had breast cancer, and in one of the surreal portions of the book the roommate is presented with a pair of amputated breasts on a plate, like the ones seen in paintings of the saint.
Shells are a third system of symbols in the story, whose title may be translated as “In a place connected with shells” or “contiguous with shells.” These are most prominently invoked in connection with saints – the narrator visits a church dedicated to St. James, one of whose attributes is the scallop shell, and then ruminates on how scallop shells were carried by pilgrims, with Göttingen having been a key stop on pilgrimage routes. But shells also of course connect to the sea in general, and in particular the narrator’s horror of the sea that swallowed Nomiya (a phrase she uses repeatedly).
All of this makes it sound like a very schematized story, and that it is. But the order these symbolic schemes suggest (planets in their orbits, pilgrims on their trek, saints in their spheres of iconography and influence) is counterbalanced by the elusiveness of the narrator’s own interpreting consciousness. Which I guess is a roundbout way of saying that the narrator often doesn’t tell us what she’s thinking, or what she thinks is happening, and thus deprives the reader of the usual clues that would help us to make sense of the narrative. Nomiya, for instance: is he a ghost, a memory, or an unexpected survivor? The narrator avoids this question, and the reader increasingly doesn’t know what to make of him. This is no doubt intentional on the author’s part, as each element of the story comes unmoored like this at some point. By the end we don’t know if we’re reading a fantasy story, a religious allegory, a dream (Natsume Sōseki’s Yume jūya 夢十夜 is invoked repeatedly), or a poem.
In many ways this reader found this extremely frustrating. The last third of the story sees the narrative all but dissolve into a rhapsodic melange of these various symbolic images, which are all invoked simultaneously in a way that is not easy to untangle. In the end I’m really not sure why the story is so insistent on the planetary imagery, or what the saints are doing there.
In other ways it’s potentially satisfying – the chaos echoes the way the earthquake and tsunami reduced the order of neighborhoods and houses into a mass of undifferentiatable detritus. The disjointed ruins of memory echo the disjointed ruins of the disaster, in other words – and we haven’t even touched on the narrator’s roommate’s truffle dog, which halfway through the story starts sniffing out discarded items from people’s pasts (which is how Agatha comes by the amputated breasts…).
The book is at its strongest when the narrator explicitly reminisces about the disaster and its aftermath. This is visceral writing, and of course the emotional core of the book. The overlapping symbolic schemes tend to blunt the edge that the 3/11 stuff might otherwise have had, weighing that part of the story down with things that probably aren’t simply Borgesian mental games but that are in danger of feeling like them. Then again, part of what the narrator obsesses about in terms of memory is the idea of distance – too much of it, not enough of it, the collapse of it in the final fantasia section – and the intellectualization represented by the symbolic schemes ties in with this, as a kind of distancing effect.
She says comparatively little about the ongoing Covid trauma, and the reader is left to decide for herself whether that’s an attempt to present Covid-enforced isolation as something that leads to meditation on the past, or whether Covid was simply a late overlay added to an already complicated narrative. In that sense it either is or isn’t the Great Covid Story we might have been waiting for.
It’s a very full book.