“Important things remain important things, no matter how much the world changes.”

Set on an island where things often disappearing from the memories of the citizens of the island – though not all of them. The ‘remembers’ somehow manage to retain their memories of the forbidden items with no explanation why. As a result, these ‘remembers’ are the prime focus of the authoritarian Memory Police. It is for this reason that the narrator, having previously lost her mother to the Memory Police, decides to take action when she discovers that her editor and friend ‘R’ can also remember things which have disappeared. In a scheme reminiscent of Nazi Germany/Anne Frank, she hides R in a secret room within her house.

The simplistic language used throughout The Memory Police really contributes to the haunting and claustrophobic atmosphere that surrounds the narrative of a world disintegrating. The nameless protagonist/characters in this book strips them of their individualism and creates a mirror for us to peer into this fictional society and reflect on what it means to be an individual, to have a name and an existence.

The narrator of the book also is an author and throughout includes excepts of their manuscripts about a woman who has lost her voice and who uses a typewriter to communicate. This story within the story also acts as a further interesting exploration of the themes of language, identity and voice.

A memorable read which provokes some interesting and important existential questions about human existence – 4 stars.

Carefully and beautifully constructed magic realist tale of a world where items go missing day to day, and their memories are erased somehow. Imagine a world where one day you lose the idea and the existence of 'bird' or 'ribbon'.

But some people seem to be immune, and the memory police are looking for them.

Alright- this was not only a great read, but the idea and plot was unique. In a world full of books with very similar plots and covers - this stood out in every way. Five stars, wishing I could give 6.

My first time reading Yoko Ogawa (beyond a brief flit with The Professer and Housekeeper) and I was unsure what to expect from the book.

What I got was a very enjoyable read, what I got was an enjoyable haunting and surreal dystopian novel. A place where things vanish birds, perfume and memories of those things. Very Orwellian and would be a good read for people who enjoy the likes of 1984 and Brave New World.

Although it was my first time reading Yoko Ogawa it certainly won’t be my last. Perhaps it is now time to revisit her earlier works. It is always great to find a new author with a sizeable back catalogue to plunder for future reads. Especially translated fiction.

Review posted on Goodreads.

‘The meaning isn’t important. What matters is the story hidden deep in the words. You’re at the point now where you’re trying to extract that story. Your soul is trying to bring back the things it lost in the disappearances.’

First published in 1994 with the original Japanese title ‘Hisoyaka na Kessho’ (roughly translated as ‘secret crystallizations’), Yoko Ogawa’s dystopian novel now gets an English translation from the ever-excellent Stephen Snyder. This is a quietly devastating study of an unseen authoritarian regime and its enforcers, the Memory Police of the title, and an island population that somehow tries to keep the one thing hidden away that can’t be controlled.

The island is unnamed, as are most of the characters. Our main narrator is a novelist, and the two main relationships she has in the book define her and her situation: R, her editor, who keeps his memories of those things which are disappeared and so is in constant fear of being found out; and the Old Man, the husband of the narrator’s late nurse, who becomes a father-figure to her. Within this narrative is our narrator’s own novel which she is writing, about a singer who loses her voice and takes up typing lessons, only for it to develop into a strangely-controlling relationship with her teacher. This story within a story gives an extra framework with which to view the book: people who are trapped, and the possibility within the creative process to forge a space where resistance to an overwhelming ideology is possible. Many residents of the island hide individuals, even whole families, who keep their memories, and our narrator hides R in a small, concealed room in her home. Ogawa herself has spoken of reading Anne Frank’s diary and there is a strong connection here with the trapped girl, whose only escape from the reality of horror was her writing.

The novel is lyrical, Ogawa’s prose a subtle and gentle observer of the events unfolding. The disappearances are quietly done, often disturbingly beautiful: roses are disappeared and the rivers fill with the entrancingly beautiful spectacle of millions of rose petals being washed out to sea; birds, too, disappear, and at one later point a solitary bird is fleetingly seen by our narrator but she is unable to remember what it is. As the novel progresses the disappearances pick up pace, and become alarmingly close to home, ending with some hauntingly moving images as the relationship between the narrator and her editor reaches its conclusion.

Ogawa is confident enough to leave the many questions each reader will have unanswered; we learn nothing of the regime behind the disappearances, the Memory Police being the symbol of this authoritarian rule. We have no idea just how these disappearances occur: how can an entire island population forget what a hat is, or what sweets taste like? And, perhaps disconcertingly for some readers, there is no neatly tied-up conclusion. The novel ends as it begins: quietly, lyrically, movingly. For me, this is where the power of the book resides, for this is more a subtle celebration of the artistic, creative spirit to face-up to what horrors confront it. Twenty-five years on from its original publication The Memory Police is, perhaps, even more relevant in today’s world. Anyone who comes to it will recognize the threats we face today: disappearing species and personal liberties, and the growing presence of extreme politics. How we confront that in our own ways is what matters. For our narrator, it is through her writing, as her editor assures her: ‘Each word you wrote will continue to exist as a memory, here in my heart, which will not disappear. You can be sure of that.’

This is a genuinely bewitching novel, hauntingly moving and beautifully crafted by the talented Yoko Ogawa. The questions it asks are much more important than any answers it gives, and for that it deserves to be read. A 5 stars must-read, for sure.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

A truly magical novel. A parable of modern times perhaps. Ideas of state surveillance and what it means to have independent thought or even existence. Mysterious and haunting - not easy to put down.

I’m really enjoying dystopian novels lately- maybe a bit of life imitating art? This didn’t disappoint- a frightening world where the Memory Police can remove memories at their whim. Although we never learn the characters names I still felt empathy towards what they were going through. I enjoyed this thoroughly

A surveillance state novel will *always* pique my interest and this soft, unravelling nightmare of a book was truly perfect. The gentle, minute details and focus on ordinary moments made this not a dystopia about rising up or making change, but rather a frail snapshot of a frightening regime.

I hadn’t read anything by Ogawa in 10 years or so, and I admit I don’t really remember anymore all the details, but I do remember I tended to like this author. Hence my seizing the opportunity to get and read this one.

It is a strange story in a way, in that, all in all, the characters are not so memorable themselves (their names are never revealed), and yet still leave an impression due to what they are going through. As inhabitants of an island where certain things disappear from memory at random, they are constantly faced with not knowing what the next thing to go will be, with the Memory Police coming to enforce this by making sure people get rid of all traces of the now-forgotten things (including also getting rid of those who are able to remember), and where one question lingers at the back of many minds: will the people themselves be forgotten someday?

The novel follows a woman who writes novels for a living, and whose mother was one of the islanders who retained their memories. While the narrator is affected by the disappearances, and does her best to lie low and be an abiding citizen, she also does uphold a tiny streak of rebellion, up to the day she decides, with the help of an old friend of the family, to hide someone who remembers in a storage space between two floors. As the disappearances increase, and the Memory Police searches more and more homes and arrests more and more people, not only does she have to face the fear of being discovered, but also her fears of what will happen in the end.

This said, the story is less about the dystopian state of the island (the size of the island itself is never specified: it feels like a small island with just one town, and at the same time it must be bigger than that), or even about providing an explanation as to the collective, gradual amnesia taking hold, and more about memories, about how various things are important for us, about exploring what forgetting could mean In time, the inhabitants lose the names of what vanished, and even when presented with a surviving item that escaped the police, said item doesn’t elicit anything in them. And there lies another question: are memories precious in themselves, or only for as long as they feel precious to us? The narrator constantly struggles with this, as another character does their best to help her recover her memories of disappeared things and she’s never sure this can even happen.

Woven into the narrative is also the story the narrator (an author) is working on, that of a typist who’s lost her voice and communicates with her lover by writing on her typing machine. At first, I wondered how this was supposed to tie with the main story, and was a little afraid it was here for flavouring more than anything else—but it does tie with it at some point, and in a very relevant way.

Conclusion: 3.5 to 4 stars. In terms of narrative and of memorable characters, this is not the most striking book ever, but it has the sort of gripping, haunting quality that won’t let go.

'The Memory Police' is a highly affecting novel following a novelist on an unnamed island in the thrawl of a totalitarian regime that continually 'disappears' everyday objects in order to pacify the people. Birds, photographs, maps, flowers, all begin to vanish from the world as the novelist hatches a plot to protect her editor, one who cannot forget the losses, from the disappearances. This is a powerfully poetic and forceful novel that moves slowly, giving the world time to expand (as within the novel it shrinks) and is a joy to read.

Breathtaking, this astounding novel presents a speculative world where objects and experiences are disappeared from memory, leaving behind existential cavities in the recollections and perceptions of the characters. The prose is tentative, elegiac and beautifully evocative of the loss, regret and formless nostalgia this engenders. This is masterfully counter- balanced by a meta-textual interlacing of the protagonist’s own novel which mirrors the motifs of control, identity and autonomy. I am going to tell everyone to read this canonical text. My students will certainly be studying it alongside Ishiguro, Angela Carter, Orwell and Atwood.

This book was very poetic while having a dystopian aspect. The topics of memories shaping our lives is really interesting and the author used it in a memorable way.

A quiet story that centres around the characters of a person as a collection of memories and unconditional friendship in a totalitarian surveillance state. We follow the lives of three friends on an isolated island where more and more objects all of a sudden disappear and with them every memory of their previous existence. An evil memory police hunt people who still remember and enforces the destruction of all disappeared pieces. While this could be the setting for an action-packed novel, it focuses with great care on the life of the individuals and their day-to-day struggles. This book gave me massive DDR (former East Germany) vibes, it was as haunting as everything I read about this former surveillance state, capturing the anxiety of its citizens and the reckless police brutality convincingly good. I raced through this novel and certainly recommend it to everyone who is intrigued by its synopsis.

I fully understand this was about the trauma of loss of memory but I just couldn't engage with the story-line. I had expected it to be thought-provoking and possibly disturbing, and sometimes it did just make me wonder if this was how it might feel to suffer from amnesia or alzheimers but I could never shed the feeling that it was just too silly and unbelievable. Sorry, but I really didn't enjoy this.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

What if every few days you lost a memory of something, such as a bird, an emerald, or sweets? What if everyone had to destroy all traces of these items for fear of being noticed by the gun-clad state police? What if the memories disappeared for almost everyone else but you, and you lived in constant fear of being taken away? These are the questions The Memory Police delves into.

Do not go into this book expecting a fast moving plot with a lot of events or explanations, as you'll be disappointed. The Memory Police is a slow book that focuses on the impact on the lives of characters living on an island where memories of things frequently disappear for most of the population. For those whose memories do not disappear, a life of fear and hiding from the Memory Police who seek to remove all remnants of things that have disappeared is reality.

I really enjoyed this book. It felt very Orwellian whilst also being a sort of descent into madness. I loved the characters, and was really moved by the hardships they had to go through in this sort of life. The main character was a writer, and something I really loved about reading this is that there was a book inside a book! The novel that the main character was writing herself reflected everything going on in her own life and intertwined really nicely with the overall story. I've rated this four stars here on Goodreads, but it was a very strong four stars and perhaps more of a 4.5. Definitely recommend!

I received a free ARC of this book from the publisher on Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!

Imagine waking up one morning to find that you have forgotten what a bird is. Any attachment, any knowledge you ever had about birds is gone, as are most of the birds themselves. Even if you see a bird, you don't have any idea what it is. It's gone from your mind forever. Pretty scary idea, right?

Now imagine your country is run by an authoritarian regime who can make things 'disappear' like this at will.

That's the conceit of The Memory Police, the newly translated novel from Yoko Ogawa, a Japanese author who has won every major literary prize in Japan. The book was originally published 25 years ago, but it's only now making the jump to English.

When the novel opens, birds, ferries, hates, ribbons, perfume and emeralds have already been disappeared, among a host of other things, but the population of the unnamed island where the book is set have tried to plow on as normal. Early in the book both roses and fruit are disappeared, and seeing the way that people 'mourn' these items, and how they are erased from existence as much as possible (e.g. all fruit falls from trees to rot on the ground) is fascinating.

But while the disappearances are mourned by most, there are people who simply don't forget. They go on remembering and treasuring these objects, living in fear that the Memory Police will discover their secret and whisk them away.

The protagonist, an unnamed female novelist, knows the pain of this all too well. Though she is affected by the disappearances, her Mother is one of those who is resistant, and she hoarded disappeared items in a dresser in the family basement until The Memory Police came and dragged her away, declaring her dead just a few days later.

Now it's just the protagonist and the 'old man', a family friend who used to operate the ferry before it was disappeared. The only other person of significance in her life (and the character who comes closest to receiving a name) is her editor R, and when R reveals he remembers the disappeared items, a plot if hatched to hide him from the Memory Police in her home.

This sets up a fascinating exploration of identity, memory, totalitarianism, resistance and oppression, that manages to feel both distinctly Japanese in setting and style, yet completely applicable to broader society.

The plot whistles along at a solid pace, balancing ruminating on loss with continued plot developments very well. The cast of characters, though small, is very interesting, with the 'old man' a particular favourite of mine. Some of R and the protagonist's choices are more questionable, but not too distracting on the whole. All this combines to mean that by the final quarter, when the plot takes some interesting twists that I wouldn't have expected, there's a solid emotional punch to the conclusion.

The decision to include the fragment of the protagonist's own novel in the book was also a decision that pays off in spades. Not only is the 'novel within a novel' a gripping story in it's own right, but it intersects with the plight and storyline of its writer in both expected and more subtle ways that give a wonderful sense of depth to the writing.

Despite being written more than 25 years ago, the book still feels incredibly fresh and relevant to today's society. The commentary on totalitarianism feels like it would fit in a modern-set dystopia, the portrayal of resistance in the face of oppression could be applied to so many societies and communities in the modern world and how we're so attention starved that we forget to appreciate the small things - how something as simple as a bird flying across the sky can be both beautiful and fleeting.

There's certainly much for discussion, with book clubs across the country guaranteed to debate this for years to come, though I feel like there aren't quite enough answers to me. A lot is left unanswered - we're left to imagine who The Memory Police are, how the disappearances work, how they started, what the end goal is - and perhaps I'd have enjoyed a few more resolutions that the reader is given, but it does mean that there's a lot of scope to transpose the novel on to the real world.

Other than some slightly questionable character decisions and the lack of answers, the only other word of caution I'd offer is that this perhaps isn't aimed at a traditional dystopia audience. Most dystopia come to some sort of resolution or conflict in a way that The Memory Police doesn't - it's definitely on the more literary end of the dystopia genre and I worry this might be off putting to some.

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and the messages it puts across about the modern world (despite being written so long ago) and I will definitely seek out more of the author's work in the near future.

I received a NetGalley review copy in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. Many thanks to Vintage for approving my request.

There have always been disappearances on the island, objects come and go, people disappear, concepts vanish in a single night. But when this process starts to speed up – what else do the Memory Police want forgotten?

The Memory Police was originally written in Japanese in 1994 and was translated for this copy by Stephen Snyder. The translation is lovingly done, there is a lot of very quotable extracts from this book and the writing flows very well and doesn’t really feel like it has been translated. The story itself is beautiful and haunting. It reminded me a lot of books such as 1984, Equilibrium and Ella Minnow Pea. Although written a while ago the themes feel very prevalent within today’s society.

I enjoyed the short story of the typist which is told throughout the book and mirrors the main plot well. The whole book is chilling and lovely to read and asks some really important questions about how much the government has control of it’s citizens and how far this can be pushed. Although it starts out quite plausible, with self- fulfilling prophecies of things that ‘disappear’ – such as objects that are willingly burnt by the citizens, things amp up to its conclusion with more abstract things disappearing or being forgotten. The tension is kept up throughout and the book held my interest and stayed with me long after I put it down.

Overall The Memory Police is a beautifully haunting tale with a powerful message – highly recommended! Thank you to NetGalley & Random House UK – Vintage Publishing and Harvill Secker for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The Memory Police is a juggling act which sets readers up with a spectacle of a concept: something strange and unsettling, something obviously dystopian and thematically intriguing, before drawing out its performance a little but all the while encouraging you to fall for its protagonists in a true and meaningful way. At last, it enters deeply unsettling territory that will have you frantically turning pages to see how it could possibly end. There are certainly issues with tone and pacing, and yet you could not say for a moment that The Memory Police ever allowed you to relax; the fear of the unknown and the quiet anxiety the book infects you with never go away. And this book has a refreshing take on the dystopian formula, with an original concept and a message vague enough to encourage debate, and yet strong enough to have your brain ticking over for days after you put it down, until the urge to pick it up again searching for answers you might have missed becomes too much to bear.

It’s safe to say Yoko Ogawa has done it again: she has shown why she’s one of the best writers Japan has; how she takes a genre or an idea into her hands and moulds it into something human, something frightening, something raw, and something wholly new.

Full review here:
https://booksandbao.com/2019/08/12/review-the-memory-police-by-yoko-ogawa/

Characterised as a science-fiction novel reminiscent of Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty Four, but with a dreamlike Kafka-esque quality of the fantastic, Yoko Ogawa’s newest English-translated novel, The Memory Police, embodies the sheer horror of loss and the inevitability of preventing it.

As usual, Ogawa’s prose is stark and clear and creates an eerie atmosphere befitting of her novel’s theme. Although there is a very vivid plot throughout the novel, it does feel at times like the story does not move forward at all, but it instead focuses on the feelings and musings of the characters. The totalitarian-like regime that is described is terrifying, presenting a society on the verge of collapse and almost famished. Although the disappearances are never really explained, leaving this fantastic element aloft, they do seem to rather represent a disappearance of culture, of the self, of one’s identity.

Ogawa’s apocalyptic magical realism is exactly my cup of tea, and so I devoured this book is just a few days. I loved the tranquil and stark writing style, I loved the world and character building, (I disaggreed with some relationships between characters, but that’s a personal issue) but at some points, the story felt a little lacking. Like it had become absorbed in its own created universe a little too much, or like it was itself a fragment of a memory unable to be forgotten.

The taste the ending leaves is bittersweet, just like the theme it explores. Memories are fickle yet precious, they are proof that some things and experiences have truly existed, they are what makes us, us. Without our memories, can we still remain the same people, or are we bound to disappear and dissolve into nothingness like our very own memories?

The Memory Police is a wonderful and terrifying book that certainly provides its readers with plenty of food for thought. I wholeheartedly recommend it to lovers of the fantastic and literary fiction alike, as I’m sure both groups will find something to relish in between its pages.

Based on an unnamed island, objects seemingly at random start to disappear. It starts with trivial things: hats, roses, birds but then it takes a more sinister turn. Most inhabitants of the island forget these objects once they disappear, but there are a few who remember everything. The latter are then in constant fear of The Memory Police, who ensure that what has disappeared is gone forever. ⁣
⁣
We follow an unnamed female novelist in her attempts to help her friend and editor R, when she discovers that he can retain memories of the banished objects. ⁣
⁣
This book for me was a bit of a slow burner but I was very intrigued by the concept- Ogawa worked really hard at creating such a quietly disturbing atmosphere and this echoes throughout the plot. We get to know little of each of the characters, we learn no names and nothing much about them- however I believe this was Ogawa’s intention. Memories are such an important part of a person’s sense of self, and without these it’s difficult to form an identity. ⁣
⁣
I wasn’t a massive fan of a novel within the novel, (we get to read excerpts of the female novelists current manuscript) however towards the end I did realise its importance and its contribution to the overall plot. ⁣
⁣
I really enjoyed this book and it left me with a lot of questions and thoughts on how important memories are and perhaps how little value we place on them until they are gone. ⁣