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SAAG is a leftist literary magazine & an argument that South Asians have claimed avant-garde traditions since longer than the word was coined. MISSION South Asian Avant-Garde (SAAG) began as an argument that South Asians have claimed avant-garde traditions since before the word was coined. They experimented wildly in form, function, and craft; some enormously impacted “European” avant-gardism. After all, “South Asia” has rarely been the locus of those histories. (See: “Picasso manqué syndrome” ) How do we carve out such a leftist magazine in the contemporary media landscape when traditional media is shuttering and where literary magazines, art exhibits, and academic journals often exist as silos? By compensating both our immensely hard-working staff and contributors. By publishing work that is thoughtful, rigorous, and self-reflective about the global left: work that connects the local and the global, work that is unafraid but not provocative simply for the sake of it, and work that is internationalist in scope. By traipsing across genres and modes of art. Perhaps most critically, we carve out our space by eschewing the boundaries and binaries implied by the term “South Asia,” emphasizing syncretic connections and mellifluous exchanges of knowledge that do not foreclose intellectual thought to borders. SAAG exists to create a genuinely activist-literary space. It does not seek to preach to the choir or provide a drifting sense of “representation.” Rather, SAAG hopes to thicken “South Asian” intellectual thought through furious expansion and lively clash. Subscribe below to get the chance to become a member of SAAG early and get early access to our online store (under construction), discounts to a dizzying variety of new merch, including subscription boxes for books, zines, board games, archival art prints, our first print issue, access to events in cities across the globe, our entire archive, and active collaboration with the editorial team. We have a lot of exciting new places to go, grassroots organizations to partner with, and stories to tell. We’d love for you to join us in interrogating and shaping South Asian Avant-Garde Vol. 2. South Asian Avant-Garde is published by 501(c)(3) nonprofit South Asian Avant-Garde, Incorporated. SUBSCRIBE Success! DESIGN The design system for Volume 2 of SAAG is wildly different to that of Volume 1, for many reasons. Read more on the process and conceptual thinking underlying the changes in the design system here . Primary sans typeface: Neue Haas Grotesk by Monotype. Serif body text: Caslon Ionic & Antique No. 6 by Commercial Type. Display face, Issue 1: TT Ricks by TypeType Foundry. Our colophon (representing the collective above) is inspired by Rabindranath Tagore's painting Head Study . COLLECTIVE We are an unwieldy, globe-spanning collective (see: masthead ) of forty-six South Asian writers, editors, academics, organizers, translators, playwrights, journalists, visual artists and designers. We share a deep political commitment to radical art that says something new about power and inequality. CHANGES As crises deepen both in and around South Asia, we extend our mission to encompass other parts of the world. Part of our mission is to forge new communities and build upon long-running traditions of solidarity across oceans, languages, and nations. The Vertical is a column that includes essential stories from around the world, featuring voices that offer a more profound introduction to critical issues impacting regions not limited to South Asia. Our reorganized categories allow various forms of work to be presented in any category. The Vertical will publish timely op-eds and dispatches in any format, whether prose, comic, or photo essay. Read Issue 1 here . THE VERTICAL South Asian Avant-Garde is a digital literary magazine for global South Asian solidarities & activist approaches to representation. ∙MISSION ∙COLLECTIVE ∙CHANGES ∙DESIGN ∙RECENT ∙EVENTS About PAST EVENTS WASHINGTON D.C. 26th October 2024 DC Zine Fest 2024 Tabling with Art Director Priyanka Kumar and Anchovy Press, with original zines by SAAG. WATCH ↗ LAHORE 21st September 2024 Community Newsroom: Lahore With Kitab Ghar Lahore WATCH ↗ BROOKLYN 21 September 2024 Brooklyn Art Book Fair 2024 Contemporary Printmaking as a Technology of Dissent, with Abeer Hoque, Priyanka Kumar, and Vrinda Jagota WATCH ↗ ISLAMABAD 3rd August 2024 Launch Event Vol. 2 Issue 2 The City State: From Master Plan to Margins WATCH ↗ LOS ANGELES 1st June 2024 An Evening with Asha Puthli at Nor Black Nor White LA. Moderated by Vrinda Jagota. Feat.: Fariha Roisin, Raveena Aurora & Mriga WATCH ↗ LOS ANGELES 28th May 2024 Community Readings on Solidarity Small World Books, Venice, CA WATCH ↗ COLOMBO 7th May 2024 Launch Event at Barefoot Gallery Narratives of Solidarity: Avant-Garde Storytelling in Sri Lanka WATCH ↗ NEW HAVEN 30th April 2024 In conversation with Amit Chaudhuri Discussing NYRB reissues A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag, & Freedom Song. WATCH ↗ BROOKLYN 30th March 2024 Launch Event Vol. 2 Issue 2 Solidarity: Across the Disaster-Verse · ShapeShifter Lab with panels, musical performances and more. WATCH ↗ NEW YORK 8th March 2024 Women, Resistance, Revolution. A SAAG & Kamli.NYC event · Panel with Gaiutra Bahadur, Gulalai Ismail & Suchitra Vijayan & musical performance by Apoorva Mudgal Ensemble. WATCH ↗ BROOKLYN 12th May 2023 Launch Event Vol. 2 Issue 1 Soapbox Gallery with album release of Apertures by Rajna Swaminathan, featuring Utsav Lal & Ganavya (Vagabonds Trio) WATCH ↗ NEW HAVEN 23rd April 2023 Film Screening JOYLAND (2023) dir. Saim Sadiq. Sponsored by the Asian-American Cultural Center, Yale Women's Center, and the Office of LGBTQ Resources. WATCH ↗ NEW YORK 22nd April 2023 In collaboration with SALAM for Rice & Resistance Tamil Labor on the Plantation WATCH ↗ LAHORE 31st December 2022 Launch Event at Kitab Ghar Literary Festival The Argument for an Internationalist Perspective of Disaster WATCH ↗ NEW YORK 22nd October 2022 In collaboration with SALAM for Rice & Resistance Climate Imperialism in Pakistan WATCH ↗ VIRTUAL 5th June 2021 In Grief, In Solidarity Panels, Films, Live Performances + more WATCH ↗ UPCOMING EVENTS MANHATTAN 9th November 2024 Grand Opening: Gul Gallery House of Gul & SAAG present Sat Chit Ananda: An Immersive Art Experience RSVP ↗ BURLINGTON 16th November 2024 Non-Fiction Comics Festival 2024 Come visit our table, with Priyanka Kumar and Anchovy Press, featuring original SAAG zines. Free to attend. ATTEND ↗ LONDON LUCKNOW Launch Events for Vol. 2 Issue 2 WATCH ↗

Submit SUBSCRIBE Success! BOOKS & ARTS THE VERTICAL FICTION & POETRY COMMUNITY FEATURES INTERACTIVE Submissions are currently closed for FICTION & POETRY, INTERACTIVE, FEATURES, and COMMUNITY. BOOKS & ARTS We are currently only open in this category for pitches on dispatches of upcoming or recent literary festivals, zine festivals, biennales, art exhibitions etc. Please limit yourself to one pitch until you have heard back and limit your pitch to two short paragraphs. Make sure to send a link of the event as well as the dates. Send your pitch with the subject heading "Festival Pitch" to info@saaganthology.com . You do not need to have attended any event before the deadline, but you must be registered for it. THE VERTICAL We are accepting pitches year-round. As crises deepen both in and around South Asia, we extend our mission to encompass other parts of the world. Part of our mission is to forge new communities and build upon longrunning traditions of solidarity across oceans, languages, and nations. The Vertical is a column centering solidarity—an effort to include essential, specific stories from across the world, featuring voices that offer a deeper introduction to key issues impacting regions not limited to South Asia. * Our aim is to ensure that we are able to publish and create space to share the work being done by marginalized communities, their voices, their struggle across different contexts in South Asia against oppression, marginalisation, active genocide and growing fascism to enable solidarities and make the movements stronger and visible in whichever way possible. The Vertical is rooted in the belief that to fight the growing inequities and systemic oppression and injustice, the movements across South Asia and the world have to be connected, the voices amplified through solidarities. Our context might be unique but the goals are common. GUIDELINES: Pitches to The Vertical must have a degree of urgency, news-worthiness, or lack of local and/or international coverage, to indicate their importance. There is no prescribed genre for such stories: we are open to more academic pieces as well as reported pieces or multimedia storytelling. However, we are unlikely to entertain humorous, satirical, or highly profane works which may be more successful as pitches in other categories. Collaborations are welcome. Please keep your pitches short: a maximum of three short paragraphs. Inform us of the story you wish to tell and why it is important in one paragraph. Tell us a bit about yourself and why you are compelled and well-positioned to write this piece in another paragraph; you may hyperlink to one or two clips although no previous publications are required. Send a maximum of two pitches at a time to vertical@saaganthology.com . We will get back to you, but we have received hundreds of pitches per open call in the past, so please bear with us. Please do not pitch us again until you receive word on one or both of your pitches. If you do not receive personalized feedback, please do not take it as a reflection of the quality of your pitch, and solely about timing and the bandwidth of our editorial team! Please note these general guidelines for the length of the final piece when pitching your work. Each piece in The Vertical is remunerated a flat fee of USD$200. Prose: Please pitch a work of short-form opinion, analysis or reportage 750-2,000 words in length. In exceptional circumstances, we may allow writers to exceed the word limit. Unless you are pitching a photo-essay, please note that prose and photography will be considered as two separate pitches. See here for an example of an opinion piece in prose. Comic: We are likely to publish the equivalent of ½-two A4-sized page(s) with original illustration. For longer works or laborious collaborations, please submit in another category. Algorithmically generated & AI art is not permitted. See here for a sample comic. Multimedia: For video, please pitch a short video about 0.5-2 minutes long. See here for an example of a short-form video. For all other genres, pitch the equivalent of the three examples provided here. Longer-form works may be better suited to our Features or Books & Arts sections. See here for an example of a long-form reported prose piece. If you envision a longer work and still believe it belongs in The Vertical, please let us know why. Please note that between pitch and publication, a great deal changes because editors at SAAG work intensively with creators to publish the best possible piece. * We deliberately do not construe "South Asia" specifically in terms of geography. This is because we recognize, as our archives indicate, that: 1. Diasporic communities originating in the subcontinent exist in countries as far east and as far west as any map will show. 2. "South Asia" is generally conceived of as countries within the subcontinent, but the history of its terminology is often nationalist, divisive, and problematic for many peoples even within the region's most populous country. As Benedict Anderson has argued, it is also a construction to some degree of the rise of area studies; its arbitrariness can be seen in the inconveniences: some countries in what is academically considered "Southeast Asia" share more historical, cultural, and linguistic similarities with those considered "South Asian" countries, and vice versa. For the purposes of The Vertical in particular, however, we do not find identity or the delineations of "South Asia" pertinent to the purpose of the column. ** Remuneration for shorter or longer works by length or works that take significantly more or less labor than average may be adjusted for accordingly in exceptional circumstances.

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“The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” BOOKS & ARTS Into the Sea Mai Ishizawa · Polly Barton “The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” It isn’t just images that become memories. Different parts of my body stored up memories, which they silently retained. Those afterimages carried that way in the body would most likely never be erased. Skin cells regenerate periodically, becoming new, but the time that passed after the earthquake and sensations from that period seemed to linger on, as a transparent layer on my skin. And yet, when I tried to pass beyond my memories, all I could see was a two-dimensional whiteness. Connecting together all my physical memories only left me with a dense accumulation of fragments—I never managed to summon up a complete picture of that day. The attributes of the memories held by each part of my body may have been a part of me, but I couldn’t combine them into any self-identifying symbols, like those of the saints. Being in a place so far away from the sea and nuclear power plants had loosened my grip on my memories of that day, obscuring my connection to them. Eventually, this sea inside me was overlayed by images of numerous paintings, which yielded new impressions. My connotations with the sea came to include those folds of pale green out of which Botticelli’s Venus rose; Caspar David Friedrich’s desolate icy sea, with the blue-black shape of the wanderer gazing out mutely at it; the sea as rendered by the impressionists, with its musical depiction of the particles of light and color dancing there; Canaletto’s sea inextricably bound to his crisp renditions of Venice; and then the peaceful blue gaze of the sea meeting the sky in Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus. This final version merged with the sea as Nomiya had described it. The peaceful times before dawn, or after sunset. The dialogues in blue that one witnessed there. Even as it served as a giant mirror reflecting the sky through which the colors flowed and passed, the powerful force of its current eddied and whirled around beneath. Yet the impressions making up this stratum had been swallowed up by the sea that March, and had vanished. None of my own memories of water were violent. I was one of those who’d watched those video clips of the sea as it destroyed everything—those scenes of destruction shown repeatedly on TV and online. That weighty gray, white and black mass surging through the town, growing heavier with the things it acquired along the way, forming new masses, encroaching still further. Watching these videos, my eyes superimposed on Nomiya’s final moments, which they’d never actually seen. Those scenes of agony that my eyes took in, the spatial and temporal holes gaping wide open in a way that could never be depicted in a painting, covering over all my other connotations. What I saw in those photos and videos hadn’t integrated with the impressions of the sea that lived inside me. Now, there wasn’t so much as a trace remaining of the pool I’d visited as a child. The pine forest, too, had been irrevocably damaged by the sea’s violence. Since seeing the destruction, the places that I’d visited had been ripped apart into tiny fragments, which returned my gaze in inert silence. This was the silence of words that had been stewing for too long. The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories. As I looked at the city, the place I’d once lived would quietly flicker past, a pale shadow. There, memories of the sea’s violence assumed particular shapes: monuments attesting to the dangers of tsunamis, the remains of a school where many people had lost their lives. 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 sea, which contained so many like Nomiya who’d never returned, didn’t bear their names—it was always people’s memories that did so. Nine years later, they continued searching, quietly yet unceasingly, to bring home the dead who had vanished into the sea. Even knowing that the city of Göttingen contained dark, bitter elements to its memories, like the rings of a tree, I was still enticed by the impression it left on me—the twisting alleys and dead-ends that my feet traced, the lush greenery spilling forth, the movement of all kinds of shadow patterns woven by the sun. Wandering around someplace, without any particular focal point, letting my eyes roam across the scenery in front of me, I would find a portrait of the city, of that particular location rising up before me. When I saw a new face of this kind that I couldn’t comprehend except through my feet, my eyes would do their best to understand how it had shifted over time. The multiple faces buried within the strata comprising numerous eras and memories would merge, then peel apart. The city reflected those different faces in flashes, like the blinking of an eye—including the face from that time when it had been known by those three characters, 月沈原. Tracing the portraits from various times with my eyes, my feet kept on pushing forward, until I reached a white plastered building with a red wooden frame creating a geometric pattern. This was the Junkernschänke—squires’ tavern—which dated back to the fifteenth century. The building had changed expression through the decades depending on its owner: from private accommodation to a vacant house, from a hardware business to a wine dealership. Its traditional wooden structure had sustained considerable damage in the March 1945 air raid, but over time, repairs had restored it to its original form. The walls were decorated with pictures rendered in multicolored wood, a number of faces peering out from small circular portraits. The sets of eyes peering out from those portholes onto a distant time belonged to seven astrological gods: those for the planets from Mercury through to Saturn—excluding Earth—plus those of the Sun and the Moon. Coincidentally enough, the seven planets as they were classified at the time of the geocentric system were preserved here, right inside the old town. The swords, scepters, bows, and other objects that the gods bore so carefully were drawn according to traditional symbolism. Here, too, their attributes protected them from anonymity, bringing their names into relief.∎ Excerpted from The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton (New Directions, March 2025). ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa (New Directions, March 2025). Cover design and illustration by Janet Hansen. Image Courtesy StudioM1. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Essay Japan Japanese Literature Translation Debut Novel Mai Ishizawa Polly Barton Survivors Earthquakes Memory Trauma Sensory Identity Seascapes Seam Contemporary Literature Melancholy Tender Imagery Fiction Ecology Environmental Disaster Gottingen's Scale Solar System Iconography Time & Space Magical Realism Literary Fiction Poetry Akutagawa Prize MAI ISHIZAWA a was born in 1980 in Sendai City, Japan, and currently lives in Germany. Her debut novel, The Place of Shells , won the Akutagawa Prize. POLLY BARTON is a writer and Japanese translator based in Bristol. Her translations include Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are , Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job , and Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden . In 2019, she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for her debut book Fifty Sounds . Her second book, Porn: An Oral History , is forthcoming. Essay Japan 19th Apr 2025 On That Note: Who is Next? 5th MAR Chats Ep. 10 · On Ambition, Immigration, Class in “Gold Diggers” 21st JUN The Craft of Writing in Occupied Kashmir 24th JAN

“The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” BOOKS & ARTS Into the Sea “The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” Mai Ishizawa · Polly Barton It isn’t just images that become memories. Different parts of my body stored up memories, which they silently retained. Those afterimages carried that way in the body would most likely never be erased. Skin cells regenerate periodically, becoming new, but the time that passed after the earthquake and sensations from that period seemed to linger on, as a transparent layer on my skin. And yet, when I tried to pass beyond my memories, all I could see was a two-dimensional whiteness. Connecting together all my physical memories only left me with a dense accumulation of fragments—I never managed to summon up a complete picture of that day. The attributes of the memories held by each part of my body may have been a part of me, but I couldn’t combine them into any self-identifying symbols, like those of the saints. Being in a place so far away from the sea and nuclear power plants had loosened my grip on my memories of that day, obscuring my connection to them. Eventually, this sea inside me was overlayed by images of numerous paintings, which yielded new impressions. My connotations with the sea came to include those folds of pale green out of which Botticelli’s Venus rose; Caspar David Friedrich’s desolate icy sea, with the blue-black shape of the wanderer gazing out mutely at it; the sea as rendered by the impressionists, with its musical depiction of the particles of light and color dancing there; Canaletto’s sea inextricably bound to his crisp renditions of Venice; and then the peaceful blue gaze of the sea meeting the sky in Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus. This final version merged with the sea as Nomiya had described it. The peaceful times before dawn, or after sunset. The dialogues in blue that one witnessed there. Even as it served as a giant mirror reflecting the sky through which the colors flowed and passed, the powerful force of its current eddied and whirled around beneath. Yet the impressions making up this stratum had been swallowed up by the sea that March, and had vanished. None of my own memories of water were violent. I was one of those who’d watched those video clips of the sea as it destroyed everything—those scenes of destruction shown repeatedly on TV and online. That weighty gray, white and black mass surging through the town, growing heavier with the things it acquired along the way, forming new masses, encroaching still further. Watching these videos, my eyes superimposed on Nomiya’s final moments, which they’d never actually seen. Those scenes of agony that my eyes took in, the spatial and temporal holes gaping wide open in a way that could never be depicted in a painting, covering over all my other connotations. What I saw in those photos and videos hadn’t integrated with the impressions of the sea that lived inside me. Now, there wasn’t so much as a trace remaining of the pool I’d visited as a child. The pine forest, too, had been irrevocably damaged by the sea’s violence. Since seeing the destruction, the places that I’d visited had been ripped apart into tiny fragments, which returned my gaze in inert silence. This was the silence of words that had been stewing for too long. The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories. As I looked at the city, the place I’d once lived would quietly flicker past, a pale shadow. There, memories of the sea’s violence assumed particular shapes: monuments attesting to the dangers of tsunamis, the remains of a school where many people had lost their lives. 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 sea, which contained so many like Nomiya who’d never returned, didn’t bear their names—it was always people’s memories that did so. Nine years later, they continued searching, quietly yet unceasingly, to bring home the dead who had vanished into the sea. Even knowing that the city of Göttingen contained dark, bitter elements to its memories, like the rings of a tree, I was still enticed by the impression it left on me—the twisting alleys and dead-ends that my feet traced, the lush greenery spilling forth, the movement of all kinds of shadow patterns woven by the sun. Wandering around someplace, without any particular focal point, letting my eyes roam across the scenery in front of me, I would find a portrait of the city, of that particular location rising up before me. When I saw a new face of this kind that I couldn’t comprehend except through my feet, my eyes would do their best to understand how it had shifted over time. The multiple faces buried within the strata comprising numerous eras and memories would merge, then peel apart. The city reflected those different faces in flashes, like the blinking of an eye—including the face from that time when it had been known by those three characters, 月沈原. Tracing the portraits from various times with my eyes, my feet kept on pushing forward, until I reached a white plastered building with a red wooden frame creating a geometric pattern. This was the Junkernschänke—squires’ tavern—which dated back to the fifteenth century. The building had changed expression through the decades depending on its owner: from private accommodation to a vacant house, from a hardware business to a wine dealership. Its traditional wooden structure had sustained considerable damage in the March 1945 air raid, but over time, repairs had restored it to its original form. The walls were decorated with pictures rendered in multicolored wood, a number of faces peering out from small circular portraits. The sets of eyes peering out from those portholes onto a distant time belonged to seven astrological gods: those for the planets from Mercury through to Saturn—excluding Earth—plus those of the Sun and the Moon. Coincidentally enough, the seven planets as they were classified at the time of the geocentric system were preserved here, right inside the old town. The swords, scepters, bows, and other objects that the gods bore so carefully were drawn according to traditional symbolism. Here, too, their attributes protected them from anonymity, bringing their names into relief.∎ Excerpted from The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton (New Directions, March 2025). It isn’t just images that become memories. Different parts of my body stored up memories, which they silently retained. Those afterimages carried that way in the body would most likely never be erased. Skin cells regenerate periodically, becoming new, but the time that passed after the earthquake and sensations from that period seemed to linger on, as a transparent layer on my skin. And yet, when I tried to pass beyond my memories, all I could see was a two-dimensional whiteness. Connecting together all my physical memories only left me with a dense accumulation of fragments—I never managed to summon up a complete picture of that day. The attributes of the memories held by each part of my body may have been a part of me, but I couldn’t combine them into any self-identifying symbols, like those of the saints. Being in a place so far away from the sea and nuclear power plants had loosened my grip on my memories of that day, obscuring my connection to them. Eventually, this sea inside me was overlayed by images of numerous paintings, which yielded new impressions. My connotations with the sea came to include those folds of pale green out of which Botticelli’s Venus rose; Caspar David Friedrich’s desolate icy sea, with the blue-black shape of the wanderer gazing out mutely at it; the sea as rendered by the impressionists, with its musical depiction of the particles of light and color dancing there; Canaletto’s sea inextricably bound to his crisp renditions of Venice; and then the peaceful blue gaze of the sea meeting the sky in Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus. This final version merged with the sea as Nomiya had described it. The peaceful times before dawn, or after sunset. The dialogues in blue that one witnessed there. Even as it served as a giant mirror reflecting the sky through which the colors flowed and passed, the powerful force of its current eddied and whirled around beneath. Yet the impressions making up this stratum had been swallowed up by the sea that March, and had vanished. None of my own memories of water were violent. I was one of those who’d watched those video clips of the sea as it destroyed everything—those scenes of destruction shown repeatedly on TV and online. That weighty gray, white and black mass surging through the town, growing heavier with the things it acquired along the way, forming new masses, encroaching still further. Watching these videos, my eyes superimposed on Nomiya’s final moments, which they’d never actually seen. Those scenes of agony that my eyes took in, the spatial and temporal holes gaping wide open in a way that could never be depicted in a painting, covering over all my other connotations. What I saw in those photos and videos hadn’t integrated with the impressions of the sea that lived inside me. Now, there wasn’t so much as a trace remaining of the pool I’d visited as a child. The pine forest, too, had been irrevocably damaged by the sea’s violence. Since seeing the destruction, the places that I’d visited had been ripped apart into tiny fragments, which returned my gaze in inert silence. This was the silence of words that had been stewing for too long. The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories. As I looked at the city, the place I’d once lived would quietly flicker past, a pale shadow. There, memories of the sea’s violence assumed particular shapes: monuments attesting to the dangers of tsunamis, the remains of a school where many people had lost their lives. 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 sea, which contained so many like Nomiya who’d never returned, didn’t bear their names—it was always people’s memories that did so. Nine years later, they continued searching, quietly yet unceasingly, to bring home the dead who had vanished into the sea. Even knowing that the city of Göttingen contained dark, bitter elements to its memories, like the rings of a tree, I was still enticed by the impression it left on me—the twisting alleys and dead-ends that my feet traced, the lush greenery spilling forth, the movement of all kinds of shadow patterns woven by the sun. Wandering around someplace, without any particular focal point, letting my eyes roam across the scenery in front of me, I would find a portrait of the city, of that particular location rising up before me. When I saw a new face of this kind that I couldn’t comprehend except through my feet, my eyes would do their best to understand how it had shifted over time. The multiple faces buried within the strata comprising numerous eras and memories would merge, then peel apart. The city reflected those different faces in flashes, like the blinking of an eye—including the face from that time when it had been known by those three characters, 月沈原. Tracing the portraits from various times with my eyes, my feet kept on pushing forward, until I reached a white plastered building with a red wooden frame creating a geometric pattern. This was the Junkernschänke—squires’ tavern—which dated back to the fifteenth century. The building had changed expression through the decades depending on its owner: from private accommodation to a vacant house, from a hardware business to a wine dealership. Its traditional wooden structure had sustained considerable damage in the March 1945 air raid, but over time, repairs had restored it to its original form. The walls were decorated with pictures rendered in multicolored wood, a number of faces peering out from small circular portraits. The sets of eyes peering out from those portholes onto a distant time belonged to seven astrological gods: those for the planets from Mercury through to Saturn—excluding Earth—plus those of the Sun and the Moon. Coincidentally enough, the seven planets as they were classified at the time of the geocentric system were preserved here, right inside the old town. The swords, scepters, bows, and other objects that the gods bore so carefully were drawn according to traditional symbolism. Here, too, their attributes protected them from anonymity, bringing their names into relief.∎ Excerpted from The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton (New Directions, March 2025). SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa (New Directions, March 2025). Cover design and illustration by Janet Hansen. Image Courtesy StudioM1. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Essay Japan Japanese Literature Translation Debut Novel Mai Ishizawa Polly Barton Survivors Earthquakes Memory Trauma Sensory Identity Seascapes Seam Contemporary Literature Melancholy Tender Imagery Fiction Ecology Environmental Disaster Gottingen's Scale Solar System Iconography Time & Space Magical Realism Literary Fiction Poetry Akutagawa Prize MAI ISHIZAWA a was born in 1980 in Sendai City, Japan, and currently lives in Germany. Her debut novel, The Place of Shells , won the Akutagawa Prize. POLLY BARTON is a writer and Japanese translator based in Bristol. Her translations include Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are , Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job , and Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden . In 2019, she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for her debut book Fifty Sounds . Her second book, Porn: An Oral History , is forthcoming. 19 Apr 2025 Essay Japan 19th Apr 2025 Ghostmother Aria Pahari 10th Apr Who is Next? Noor Bakhsh · Qasum Faraz · Sajid Hussain 5th Mar Dukkha Sumana Roy 4th Jul Chats Ep. 10 · On Ambition, Immigration, Class in “Gold Diggers” Sanjena Sathian 21st Jun The Craft of Writing in Occupied Kashmir Huzaifa Pandit 24th Jan On That Note:

· BOOKS & ARTS Essay · Japan Into the Sea “The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa (New Directions, March 2025). Cover design and illustration by Janet Hansen. Image Courtesy StudioM1. It isn’t just images that become memories. Different parts of my body stored up memories, which they silently retained. Those afterimages carried that way in the body would most likely never be erased. Skin cells regenerate periodically, becoming new, but the time that passed after the earthquake and sensations from that period seemed to linger on, as a transparent layer on my skin. And yet, when I tried to pass beyond my memories, all I could see was a two-dimensional whiteness. Connecting together all my physical memories only left me with a dense accumulation of fragments—I never managed to summon up a complete picture of that day. The attributes of the memories held by each part of my body may have been a part of me, but I couldn’t combine them into any self-identifying symbols, like those of the saints. Being in a place so far away from the sea and nuclear power plants had loosened my grip on my memories of that day, obscuring my connection to them. Eventually, this sea inside me was overlayed by images of numerous paintings, which yielded new impressions. My connotations with the sea came to include those folds of pale green out of which Botticelli’s Venus rose; Caspar David Friedrich’s desolate icy sea, with the blue-black shape of the wanderer gazing out mutely at it; the sea as rendered by the impressionists, with its musical depiction of the particles of light and color dancing there; Canaletto’s sea inextricably bound to his crisp renditions of Venice; and then the peaceful blue gaze of the sea meeting the sky in Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus. This final version merged with the sea as Nomiya had described it. The peaceful times before dawn, or after sunset. The dialogues in blue that one witnessed there. Even as it served as a giant mirror reflecting the sky through which the colors flowed and passed, the powerful force of its current eddied and whirled around beneath. Yet the impressions making up this stratum had been swallowed up by the sea that March, and had vanished. None of my own memories of water were violent. I was one of those who’d watched those video clips of the sea as it destroyed everything—those scenes of destruction shown repeatedly on TV and online. That weighty gray, white and black mass surging through the town, growing heavier with the things it acquired along the way, forming new masses, encroaching still further. Watching these videos, my eyes superimposed on Nomiya’s final moments, which they’d never actually seen. Those scenes of agony that my eyes took in, the spatial and temporal holes gaping wide open in a way that could never be depicted in a painting, covering over all my other connotations. What I saw in those photos and videos hadn’t integrated with the impressions of the sea that lived inside me. Now, there wasn’t so much as a trace remaining of the pool I’d visited as a child. The pine forest, too, had been irrevocably damaged by the sea’s violence. Since seeing the destruction, the places that I’d visited had been ripped apart into tiny fragments, which returned my gaze in inert silence. This was the silence of words that had been stewing for too long. The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories. As I looked at the city, the place I’d once lived would quietly flicker past, a pale shadow. There, memories of the sea’s violence assumed particular shapes: monuments attesting to the dangers of tsunamis, the remains of a school where many people had lost their lives. 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 sea, which contained so many like Nomiya who’d never returned, didn’t bear their names—it was always people’s memories that did so. Nine years later, they continued searching, quietly yet unceasingly, to bring home the dead who had vanished into the sea. Even knowing that the city of Göttingen contained dark, bitter elements to its memories, like the rings of a tree, I was still enticed by the impression it left on me—the twisting alleys and dead-ends that my feet traced, the lush greenery spilling forth, the movement of all kinds of shadow patterns woven by the sun. Wandering around someplace, without any particular focal point, letting my eyes roam across the scenery in front of me, I would find a portrait of the city, of that particular location rising up before me. When I saw a new face of this kind that I couldn’t comprehend except through my feet, my eyes would do their best to understand how it had shifted over time. The multiple faces buried within the strata comprising numerous eras and memories would merge, then peel apart. The city reflected those different faces in flashes, like the blinking of an eye—including the face from that time when it had been known by those three characters, 月沈原. Tracing the portraits from various times with my eyes, my feet kept on pushing forward, until I reached a white plastered building with a red wooden frame creating a geometric pattern. This was the Junkernschänke—squires’ tavern—which dated back to the fifteenth century. The building had changed expression through the decades depending on its owner: from private accommodation to a vacant house, from a hardware business to a wine dealership. Its traditional wooden structure had sustained considerable damage in the March 1945 air raid, but over time, repairs had restored it to its original form. The walls were decorated with pictures rendered in multicolored wood, a number of faces peering out from small circular portraits. The sets of eyes peering out from those portholes onto a distant time belonged to seven astrological gods: those for the planets from Mercury through to Saturn—excluding Earth—plus those of the Sun and the Moon. Coincidentally enough, the seven planets as they were classified at the time of the geocentric system were preserved here, right inside the old town. The swords, scepters, bows, and other objects that the gods bore so carefully were drawn according to traditional symbolism. Here, too, their attributes protected them from anonymity, bringing their names into relief.∎ Excerpted from The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton (New Directions, March 2025). SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Japan Japanese Literature Translation Debut Novel Mai Ishizawa Polly Barton Survivors Earthquakes Memory Trauma Sensory Identity Seascapes Seam Contemporary Literature Melancholy Tender Imagery Fiction Ecology Environmental Disaster Gottingen's Scale Solar System Iconography Time & Space Magical Realism Literary Fiction Poetry Akutagawa Prize Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 19th Apr 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

“The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” BOOKS & ARTS Into the Sea “The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” GENERAL ESSAY AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa (New Directions, March 2025). Cover design and illustration by Janet Hansen. Image Courtesy StudioM1. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa (New Directions, March 2025). Cover design and illustration by Janet Hansen. Image Courtesy StudioM1. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Essay Japan 19th Apr 2025 Essay Japan Japanese Literature Translation Debut Novel Mai Ishizawa Polly Barton Survivors Earthquakes Memory Trauma Sensory Identity Seascapes Seam Contemporary Literature Melancholy Tender Imagery Fiction Ecology Environmental Disaster Gottingen's Scale Solar System Iconography Time & Space Magical Realism Literary Fiction Poetry Akutagawa Prize Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. It isn’t just images that become memories. Different parts of my body stored up memories, which they silently retained. Those afterimages carried that way in the body would most likely never be erased. Skin cells regenerate periodically, becoming new, but the time that passed after the earthquake and sensations from that period seemed to linger on, as a transparent layer on my skin. And yet, when I tried to pass beyond my memories, all I could see was a two-dimensional whiteness. Connecting together all my physical memories only left me with a dense accumulation of fragments—I never managed to summon up a complete picture of that day. The attributes of the memories held by each part of my body may have been a part of me, but I couldn’t combine them into any self-identifying symbols, like those of the saints. Being in a place so far away from the sea and nuclear power plants had loosened my grip on my memories of that day, obscuring my connection to them. Eventually, this sea inside me was overlayed by images of numerous paintings, which yielded new impressions. My connotations with the sea came to include those folds of pale green out of which Botticelli’s Venus rose; Caspar David Friedrich’s desolate icy sea, with the blue-black shape of the wanderer gazing out mutely at it; the sea as rendered by the impressionists, with its musical depiction of the particles of light and color dancing there; Canaletto’s sea inextricably bound to his crisp renditions of Venice; and then the peaceful blue gaze of the sea meeting the sky in Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus. This final version merged with the sea as Nomiya had described it. The peaceful times before dawn, or after sunset. The dialogues in blue that one witnessed there. Even as it served as a giant mirror reflecting the sky through which the colors flowed and passed, the powerful force of its current eddied and whirled around beneath. Yet the impressions making up this stratum had been swallowed up by the sea that March, and had vanished. None of my own memories of water were violent. I was one of those who’d watched those video clips of the sea as it destroyed everything—those scenes of destruction shown repeatedly on TV and online. That weighty gray, white and black mass surging through the town, growing heavier with the things it acquired along the way, forming new masses, encroaching still further. Watching these videos, my eyes superimposed on Nomiya’s final moments, which they’d never actually seen. Those scenes of agony that my eyes took in, the spatial and temporal holes gaping wide open in a way that could never be depicted in a painting, covering over all my other connotations. What I saw in those photos and videos hadn’t integrated with the impressions of the sea that lived inside me. Now, there wasn’t so much as a trace remaining of the pool I’d visited as a child. The pine forest, too, had been irrevocably damaged by the sea’s violence. Since seeing the destruction, the places that I’d visited had been ripped apart into tiny fragments, which returned my gaze in inert silence. This was the silence of words that had been stewing for too long. The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories. As I looked at the city, the place I’d once lived would quietly flicker past, a pale shadow. There, memories of the sea’s violence assumed particular shapes: monuments attesting to the dangers of tsunamis, the remains of a school where many people had lost their lives. 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 sea, which contained so many like Nomiya who’d never returned, didn’t bear their names—it was always people’s memories that did so. Nine years later, they continued searching, quietly yet unceasingly, to bring home the dead who had vanished into the sea. Even knowing that the city of Göttingen contained dark, bitter elements to its memories, like the rings of a tree, I was still enticed by the impression it left on me—the twisting alleys and dead-ends that my feet traced, the lush greenery spilling forth, the movement of all kinds of shadow patterns woven by the sun. Wandering around someplace, without any particular focal point, letting my eyes roam across the scenery in front of me, I would find a portrait of the city, of that particular location rising up before me. When I saw a new face of this kind that I couldn’t comprehend except through my feet, my eyes would do their best to understand how it had shifted over time. The multiple faces buried within the strata comprising numerous eras and memories would merge, then peel apart. The city reflected those different faces in flashes, like the blinking of an eye—including the face from that time when it had been known by those three characters, 月沈原. Tracing the portraits from various times with my eyes, my feet kept on pushing forward, until I reached a white plastered building with a red wooden frame creating a geometric pattern. This was the Junkernschänke—squires’ tavern—which dated back to the fifteenth century. The building had changed expression through the decades depending on its owner: from private accommodation to a vacant house, from a hardware business to a wine dealership. Its traditional wooden structure had sustained considerable damage in the March 1945 air raid, but over time, repairs had restored it to its original form. The walls were decorated with pictures rendered in multicolored wood, a number of faces peering out from small circular portraits. The sets of eyes peering out from those portholes onto a distant time belonged to seven astrological gods: those for the planets from Mercury through to Saturn—excluding Earth—plus those of the Sun and the Moon. Coincidentally enough, the seven planets as they were classified at the time of the geocentric system were preserved here, right inside the old town. The swords, scepters, bows, and other objects that the gods bore so carefully were drawn according to traditional symbolism. Here, too, their attributes protected them from anonymity, bringing their names into relief.∎ Excerpted from The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton (New Directions, March 2025). More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

“The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” BOOKS & ARTS Into the Sea AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Essay Japan Japanese Literature Translation Debut Novel Mai Ishizawa Polly Barton Survivors Earthquakes Memory Trauma Sensory Identity Seascapes Seam Contemporary Literature Melancholy Tender Imagery Fiction Ecology Environmental Disaster Gottingen's Scale Solar System Iconography Time & Space Magical Realism Literary Fiction Poetry Akutagawa Prize Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Essay Japan 19th Apr 2025 It isn’t just images that become memories. Different parts of my body stored up memories, which they silently retained. Those afterimages carried that way in the body would most likely never be erased. Skin cells regenerate periodically, becoming new, but the time that passed after the earthquake and sensations from that period seemed to linger on, as a transparent layer on my skin. And yet, when I tried to pass beyond my memories, all I could see was a two-dimensional whiteness. Connecting together all my physical memories only left me with a dense accumulation of fragments—I never managed to summon up a complete picture of that day. The attributes of the memories held by each part of my body may have been a part of me, but I couldn’t combine them into any self-identifying symbols, like those of the saints. Being in a place so far away from the sea and nuclear power plants had loosened my grip on my memories of that day, obscuring my connection to them. Eventually, this sea inside me was overlayed by images of numerous paintings, which yielded new impressions. My connotations with the sea came to include those folds of pale green out of which Botticelli’s Venus rose; Caspar David Friedrich’s desolate icy sea, with the blue-black shape of the wanderer gazing out mutely at it; the sea as rendered by the impressionists, with its musical depiction of the particles of light and color dancing there; Canaletto’s sea inextricably bound to his crisp renditions of Venice; and then the peaceful blue gaze of the sea meeting the sky in Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus. This final version merged with the sea as Nomiya had described it. The peaceful times before dawn, or after sunset. The dialogues in blue that one witnessed there. Even as it served as a giant mirror reflecting the sky through which the colors flowed and passed, the powerful force of its current eddied and whirled around beneath. Yet the impressions making up this stratum had been swallowed up by the sea that March, and had vanished. None of my own memories of water were violent. I was one of those who’d watched those video clips of the sea as it destroyed everything—those scenes of destruction shown repeatedly on TV and online. That weighty gray, white and black mass surging through the town, growing heavier with the things it acquired along the way, forming new masses, encroaching still further. Watching these videos, my eyes superimposed on Nomiya’s final moments, which they’d never actually seen. Those scenes of agony that my eyes took in, the spatial and temporal holes gaping wide open in a way that could never be depicted in a painting, covering over all my other connotations. What I saw in those photos and videos hadn’t integrated with the impressions of the sea that lived inside me. Now, there wasn’t so much as a trace remaining of the pool I’d visited as a child. The pine forest, too, had been irrevocably damaged by the sea’s violence. Since seeing the destruction, the places that I’d visited had been ripped apart into tiny fragments, which returned my gaze in inert silence. This was the silence of words that had been stewing for too long. The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories. As I looked at the city, the place I’d once lived would quietly flicker past, a pale shadow. There, memories of the sea’s violence assumed particular shapes: monuments attesting to the dangers of tsunamis, the remains of a school where many people had lost their lives. 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 sea, which contained so many like Nomiya who’d never returned, didn’t bear their names—it was always people’s memories that did so. Nine years later, they continued searching, quietly yet unceasingly, to bring home the dead who had vanished into the sea. Even knowing that the city of Göttingen contained dark, bitter elements to its memories, like the rings of a tree, I was still enticed by the impression it left on me—the twisting alleys and dead-ends that my feet traced, the lush greenery spilling forth, the movement of all kinds of shadow patterns woven by the sun. Wandering around someplace, without any particular focal point, letting my eyes roam across the scenery in front of me, I would find a portrait of the city, of that particular location rising up before me. When I saw a new face of this kind that I couldn’t comprehend except through my feet, my eyes would do their best to understand how it had shifted over time. The multiple faces buried within the strata comprising numerous eras and memories would merge, then peel apart. The city reflected those different faces in flashes, like the blinking of an eye—including the face from that time when it had been known by those three characters, 月沈原. Tracing the portraits from various times with my eyes, my feet kept on pushing forward, until I reached a white plastered building with a red wooden frame creating a geometric pattern. This was the Junkernschänke—squires’ tavern—which dated back to the fifteenth century. The building had changed expression through the decades depending on its owner: from private accommodation to a vacant house, from a hardware business to a wine dealership. Its traditional wooden structure had sustained considerable damage in the March 1945 air raid, but over time, repairs had restored it to its original form. The walls were decorated with pictures rendered in multicolored wood, a number of faces peering out from small circular portraits. The sets of eyes peering out from those portholes onto a distant time belonged to seven astrological gods: those for the planets from Mercury through to Saturn—excluding Earth—plus those of the Sun and the Moon. Coincidentally enough, the seven planets as they were classified at the time of the geocentric system were preserved here, right inside the old town. The swords, scepters, bows, and other objects that the gods bore so carefully were drawn according to traditional symbolism. Here, too, their attributes protected them from anonymity, bringing their names into relief.∎ Excerpted from The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton (New Directions, March 2025). Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up: