The Memory Police
Yoko Ogawa
On an unnamed island things stop existing in people's minds, hats and perfume and birds and ribbons, and the Memory Police see to the removal of whatever has been forgotten. The narrator, a novelist, hides her editor in a concealed room in her house because he is one of the few who still remembers. The Japanese original is from 1994 and Stephen Snyder's translation only appeared in 2019, which is the year most coverage gives; the link is the Vintage paperback.
Why you should read this
Ogawa's dystopia about state-enforced forgetting, translated into English decades after its original Japanese publication and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Quiet and controlled in tone rather than dramatic, closer to Kafka's bureaucratic dread than to conventional dystopian action.
- Field
- Literature
- Form
- Fiction
- Published
- 1994
- Themes
- East AsianFiction
