Yet, she is still affected by the loss of memory – struggling to remember the objects and ideas erased. She protects others who are targeted by the Memory Police at her own risk and goes face-to-face with the brutality of their surveillance and erasure throughout the novel. The female protagonist is caring and concerned, more conscious of the harm committed by the Memory Police than the other passive citizens. She becomes a writer and remains unnamed throughout the novel, building relationships with an old man she meets who used to operate a ferry and becoming close with her editor, R.Īll three of the characters endanger their lives as they challenge the Memory Police by hiding, writing, and most of all – remembering. The daughter loses her mother and then her father at a young age, adding to the list of things once loved that have disappeared, “fading away” like the lost memories of birds. The mother tries to explain what the things she secretly kept once were before they “disappeared,” trying to describe perfume to her daughter who never knew the word nor the smell. Ogawa begins her novel with a memory, one of an exchange between a mother and daughter reminiscing about a time when there were more things in this world, before the Memory Police. Her other works include The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003), The Diving Pool (2008) and Revenge (2013). The Japanese author has received nearly every literary award there is to be given in Japan, making her a renowned novelist in Japan as well as abroad. The Memory Police, originally published in 1994, makes a comeback this year, translated for the first time into English by Stephen Snyder. The Memory Police take away everything, leaving nothing but empty spaces on shelves and gashes in the public memory of the island’s residents.

On the unnamed island in Yōko Ogawa’s novel The Memory Police, this is exactly what happens. What would happen if your memories were stolen? If everything around you – birds, perfume, and even roses – disappeared, never to be remembered again?

The memory police yoko ogawa