The narrator’s mother, for instance, hides disappeared objects in small, hollowed-out sculptures, while the narrator herself struggles to access her memories in an effort to finish the novel she’s writing. It’s clear this is how the publisher would like the novel to be viewed, as “Orwellian,” perhaps even hoping it falls into the somewhat dubious and defanged category of “resistance lit.” While we can safely presume Ogawa’s political leanings are anti-fascist, the marketing conceals what might otherwise be presented as a prismatic and multilayered work of literature, one that is insistent on avoiding easy answers to the questions it poses.Ĭentral to the novel is the idea that art’s natural state is one of resistance or is somehow inherently anti-authoritarian. The novel’s title may lead some to believe this is a contemporary response to the rise of right-wing extremism and authoritarianism (one early review in a trade magazine mistakenly implied Ogawa had written The Memory Police recently, instead of in the early 1990s). When the unnamed narrator learns that her editor is one of those whose memory is unaffected by the disappearances, she resolves to hide him in a small room between the first and second floors of her house.

The Memory Police apprehend anyone who shows signs of being able to remember (most people forget) along with anyone who keeps safe the apparently random objects that disappear. As the physical world slowly disappears around her (birds, ribbon, emeralds, candies, and more) so do the people who are able to remember the disappeared objects. The unnamed narrator is a novelist and the daughter of a sculptress living on an unnamed island off the coast of a larger unnamed island.

There are tropes and moments present that one might reasonably label “Orwellian,” but at its center The Memory Police is a story about what it means to be a writer and the impermanence of art, all masquerading as a dystopian fable. Written before most of her other work that Stephen Snyder has translated into English, it shows her digging into many of the same concerns as her later work: art, loss, beauty, love, memory, caretaking, and old age. IN THE MEMORY POLICE, Yoko Ogawa delivers an enigmatic, uncanny, and richly rewarding novel.

Yoko ogawa's the memory police