Ogawa, Yoko

Staff Pick!

Allanah says…

Memory seems to be a recurring theme in Ogawa’s work. This is a world of extreme censorship, where whole beings and concepts are deemed irrelevant and forcibly forgotten across the town. The residents begin to wonder, what will happen when they forget the breeze? What happens when water disappears? It’s a surrealist story that balances the grief of memory loss and the importance of remembering as a society.

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Hat, ribbon, bird, rose. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed. When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn’t forget, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next? ‘The Memory Police’ is a beautiful, haunting and provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss from one of Japan’s greatest writers. For readers of The Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451 and Nineteen Eighty-Four.