Author(s): Yoko Ogawa

Novel | Dystopia, Science Fiction and Fantasy | Translated fiction | Japan | Read our reviews!

'A masterpiece' Guardian

A compelling speculative mystery by one of Japan's greatest writers.

Hat, ribbon, bird, rose. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed. When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn't forget, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?

The Memory Police is a beautiful, haunting and provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, from one of Japan's greatest writers.

'One of Japan's most acclaimed authors explores truth, state surveillance and individual autonomy. Echoes 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and 100 Years of Solitude, but it has a voice and power all its own' Time Magazine

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE**

STELLA'S REVIEW:
Who are the Memory Police? With their purposeful stride, their polished boots, guns at the hip, expressionless faces, and their dark green trucks with canvas covers, they are reminiscent of Bradbury’s Firemen and Orwell’s Big Brother troops. Living on the island controlled by the Memory Police (we never know who they work for or what exactly their mission is aside from oppressing memory) are the Novelist and her editor, ‘R’. The Novelist’s parents are long dead and her world is a small community — her neighbours, the editor and an old family friend, simply known to us as The Old Man. As more objects disappear, the Novelist becomes increasingly unsettled. Like most of the inhabitants, she easily accepts the loss of objects. One day the rose bushes are no longer ,and for several days the rivers are filled with petals gently being washed out to sea. “None of the petals were withered or brown. On the contrary, perhaps because the water was so cold, they seemed fresher and fuller than ever, and their fragrance, mixed with the morning mist from the river, was overpoweringly strong. Petals covered the surface as far as the eye could see.” A few days later the rose and the idea of the rose simply cease to exist. The inhabitants’ memories are wiped. The forgetting is like a mist: evasive. Yet some don’t forget and when they can no longer hide this they literally go into hiding. The first person the Novelist knew who was like this was her mother, a sculptor. She would keep objects (keepsakes) in a cabinet in her studio and share these with her daughter, then a young girl, hoping to trigger a sense of understanding — a connection to the past through the items she placed in her hands telling stories, hoping to trigger memories. But her mother’s purpose was greater — to preserve what the Memory Police tried to blackout. When ‘R’ is in danger of being discovered (he remembers) the Novelist and the Old Man construct a secret room in her house and hide him from the authorities. They are lucky. Life carries on despite the increasingly fast pace of disappearances. Calendars go, dates and days, months are no longer. And in turn, the inhabitants wonder whether winter will ever cease — as if by thinking just this, spring fails to arrive. Novels are no longer and you can imagine the book burnings. And a novelist no longer knows what or why she writes. R encourages her to continue in secret, demanding that her manuscript remains hidden with him. While the words do not come at all at first, eventually a word does emerge, along with what she feels are nonsensical phrases, and through perseverance she does write again — but now it is with a great personal cost. When a body cannot function, can that person still be in existence? Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police is haunting and fascinating, an allegory for totalitarianism, as well as an exploration of memory and forgetting. What is memory, and are objects necessary to understand our past? In what part of ourselves do we truly exist: the physical or the consciousness — and what happens to one without the other? Ogawa’s novel is fascinating on many levels and her prose is a joy to read with its simple style and depth of meaning.

-------------------

Review: The Memory Police is a masterpiece: a deep pool that can be experienced as fable or allegory, warning and illumination. It is a novel that makes us see differently, opening up its ideas in inconspicuous ways, knowing that all moments of understanding and grace are fleeting. It is political and human, it makes no promises. It is a rare work of patient and courageous vision -- Madeleine Thien * Guardian *
It's an age since I read a book as strange, beautiful and affecting... this haunting work reaches beyond...to examine what it is to be human... a remarkable writer * Sunday Times *
Masterly...Like Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, Yoko Ogawa's novel transforms a familiar metaphor into imaginative truth. -- Jia Tolentino * The New Yorker *
In a feat of dark imagination, Yoko Ogawa stages an intimate, suspenseful drama of courage and endurance while conjuring up a world that is at once recognizable and profoundly strange * Wall Street Journal *
Explores questions of power, trauma and state surveillance...particularly resonant now, at a time of rising authoritarianism across the globe. * New York Times, pick of the month *

Prizes: Short-listed for The Kitschies Red Tentacle Award 2020 (UK).

Author Biography: Yoko Ogawa (Author) Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space and Zoetrope. Her works include The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas, The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris and Revenge.