The Place of Shells

In the summer of 2020, a young Japanese academic in Göttingen, Germany, meets her old friend Nomiya, who died in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan and has now returned. She shows him the city, including its scale model of the solar system, and they talk about her doctoral research and their mutual friends. His presence gradually unsettles her and the world around them: strange objects appear in the forest, the model of Pluto disappears and returns, and time seems to come loose. The English translation is by Polly Barton.