This is a well written book that clearly appeals to a number of people but not for me, I did not like it. The style in which the book is written is interesting, We do not know the names of anything, not the Island, not the people within it nor the places. Individuals are identified by trade or role, the only indentifier is R. Thus we too can have no memory of these people. That said I did not enjoy it. There is no back story, I have to be careful here not to spoil but we end the book not knowing the who, the how or the why and for me this makes it pointless. I found the story a little disturbing and did not enjoy it. Had this not been a netgalley copy I would not have continued reading.

A very interesting premise - that a regime can literally remove things from the collective memory, even though the things themselves continue to exist. The gentle storytelling makes the slow creep of unease all the more interesting.

Originally written in Japanese, this edition is translated by Stephen Snyder. It is set on an unnamed island where things keep disappearing. The Memory police will then systematically take and destroy all things relating to the thing that disappeared. None of the characters are named; the closet we get to a name is a character called R. As you may be able to guess from the title of the book, memory and its importance to us plays an important role in the plot. It was an interesting and at times unnerving read. I found it to be a fairly slow read, as I felt it was one of those books you need to take your time over. I would definitely recommend checking it out if the synopsis intrigues you.

This is a beautifully told fable about how a totalitarian state seeps into lives of its citizens, first controlling their possessions, then themselves. An unnamed novelist is struggling to write her latest novel amidst ‘disappearances’ on her island. Now the ‘ferry’ has disappeared from memory their community is more isolated than ever. But not everyone forgets...and the Memory Police are there to ensure order and enforce forgetting. The protagonist harbours her editor who retains all his memories, but when parts of herself begin to disappear it becomes ever harder to keep him safe. Within the story, we see the novelist’s manuscript-in-progress about a woman whose voice is consumed by a typewriter and who slowly loses her sense of self. This is a perfect complement to the main action. In all, this is Japan’s answer to Fahrenheit 451 and a moving read.

This book is a fairly gentle story of an island where things are being erased from people's minds. The concept was sad yet interesting, as the memory Police make innocent things like roses and perfume disappear.
But, for some reason, this book just didn't grab me. I wasn't that interested in the novel the main character is writing and I felt it kept encroaching on the story rather than enriching it. The characters were okay but the lack of names and descriptions meant I didn't really empathise with them. I'm sure it was a technique linked with the idea of controlling thoughts but I found the characters in the novel to be distant. The mystery surrounding the mother and the others who still remember wasn't enough to keep me reading..
Overall, I found this novel very blah.

"You're the same person now that you were when you wrote novels. The only thing that's changed is that the books have been burnt. But even if paper itself disappears, words will remain. It will be all right, you'll see. We haven't lost the stories."

Rating: 3.5 stars

Usually on a 3.5 stars I round it down to 3 stars out of 5, but I'm making an exception for this one because I absolutely couldn't put this book down. Once I'd gotten started, I was reading it at work in between orders, and stood in the kitchen waiting for food.

The Memory Police is an allegorical dystopia that, ultimately is about so much more than it appears. On the island of this story lives a novelist, working on her manuscripts quietly and trying to keep under the radar of the Memory Police who anyone who doesn't lose their memories when things disappear. But at heart, this is a book about humanity and personality and asks a lot of interesting questions about how our memories and experiences, and our feelings about those experience shape who we are as a person. It's an overall unnerving read, actually discomforting in parts. I described it to my housemate as giving me a 'general aura of stress'. I think this is going to be the kind of book that I'm thinking about for a while before all the implications sink in.

A strange and arresting novel that draws you ever inward, The Memory Police is dreamlike and melancholy.
It is best read with the expectation of an art piece - whilst I was teased by threads of plot and denouement, ultimately it is a book that focuses on an idea and a feeling, and explores that through the metephor of the memory police.
I enjoyed it, however, I would have preferred that the protagonist find out more about what is happening to them, why, and fix it. I'm aware this opinion comes from reading too many fantasy novels with a quest, but it started in a similar vein, but then changed into the art-novel.
Recommended for readers of Murukami.

'The Memory Police' is a strange, haunting novel - a kind of dystopian allegory centred around the theme of memory. In her understated, unsettling prose, Yoko Ogawa explores how our pasts - our intimate, every day histories - shape us.

Many aspects of the world are left unexplained - and readers hoping for a thrilling dystopian plot will probably be disappointed. But that doesn't make the island setting, slowly succumbing to the effects of climate change and oppressed by the sinister Memory Police, any less ominous. In fact, it just adds to the effect of a vague, indistinct world from which anything can disappear at any moment.

'The Memory Police' makes for an unsettling, thought-provoking read; an eerie exploration of memory, survival and what makes us human.

Who we are strongly depends on our past experiences and the reality that has surrounded us, so what happens if, bit by bit, this reality is made to disappear, and with it the memories ingrained in our hearts? In Yoko Ogawa's highly allegorical novel, the enigmatic "memory police" is controlling the population of a remote island, subjugating the inhabitants by continually forcing them to destroy and forget things like roses, perfume or birds, and all memories attached to them. Every lost memory leaves a new hole in people's hearts, but those who won't forget will be taken away and might get killed. How long can a person endure when those trying to control their mind eat away at their heart?

Our protagonist is an unnamed young novelist, thus a person who professionally creates coherence and identity, who aims to preserve and represent the world in narratives. When the memory police prepares to arrest her editor because he is unable to erase his memories, she hides him in her home, aided by an old man she befriended. Secretly, she tries to proceed working on her latest novel about a woman who has lost her voice - this whole novel-within-the-novel is twisting and reflecting the narrated world, asking questions about expression (losing your voice and losing your memory), freedom (being phsyically and psychologically captured), and death (losing your identity and losing your phsyical self). In all constellations Ogawa presents, I was fascinated by the protagonists' coping mechanisms, which you could often just as well call self-betrayal - this text is also a meditation on the workings of the mind under the conditions of authoritarian terror or human cruelty.

In this novel, a lot remains unexplained, e.g. why some people can and others can't forget as ordered by the memory police, what the ultimate goal of the memory police is (if they even have one beyond total control), or who their bosses are. Sometimes, I also felt like the author wasn't able to stringently employ her narrative concept, because how should the characters refer to things after they have disappeared? On top of that, there is the theme of climate change hovering in the background, but it isn't coherently tied into the main storyline. Still, these factor do not diminish the impact of the text, which more than anything is set up to be an allegory. In this respect, Ogawa's work reminded me of the wonderful Han Kang.

"The new cavities in my heart search for things to burn. They drive me to burn things and I can only stop when everything is in ashes", explains the narrator's editor at one point. This book contains numerous sentences like this one, investigating the relationship between memory, feelings, freedom and identity. A very worthwhile read, cleverly constructed and rendered with a lot of poetic sensibility.