Yōko Ogawa

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.

When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.

A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.

The Memory Police

sazha 

Hati tidak memiliki bentuk dan batasan. Itulah sebabnya kau bisa memasukkan semua hal ke dalamnya. 

“No, don’t worry. It doesn’t hurt, and you won’t even be particularly sad. One morning you’ll simply wake up and it will be over, before you’ve even realized. Lying still, eyes closed, ears pricked, trying to sense the flow of the morning air, you’ll feel that something has changed from the night before, and you’ll know that you’ve lost something, that something has been disappeared from the island.”

Gemma McCarthy

"No, that's not really a problem. A heart has no shape, no limits. That's why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It's much like your memory, in that sense."

"If you read a novel to the end, then it's over. I would never want to do something as waste- ful as that. I'd much rather keep it here with me, safe and sound, forever."

Laura

I may have managed to finish the story, but I'm still losing myself.

Aren't we together, right now, in spite of everything?

'Men who start by burning books end by burning other men,'

No one knows and no one needs to know. Time is a great healer. It just flows on all of its own accord.

"And what will happen if words disappear?" I whispered to myself, afraid that if I said it too loudly, it might come true.

taylor miles hopkins

…but at some point it vanished. I suppose, over time, that happened to lots of things, even without the disappearances.

I remembered. The pages of the book had opened and fluttered through the air just the way birds had once spread their wings and flown off to distant places. But this memory, too, was soon erased by the flames, leaving behind nothing but the burning night.

“A heart has no shape, no limits. That's why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why It can hold so much. It's much like your memory, in that sense."

No matter how careful we are, we all leave behind little bits of ourselves as we go about our lives. 

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020, an enthralling Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance from one of Japan's greatest writers. 'Beautiful... Haunting' Sunday Times 'A dreamlike story of dystopia' Jia Tolentino __________ 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? __________ Finalist for the National Book Award 2019 Longlisted for the Translated Book Award 2020 New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year 'This timeless fable of control and loss feels more timely than ever' Guardian, Books of the Year 'Echoes the themes of George Orwell's 1984, but it has a voice and power all its own' Time 'A novel that makes us see differently... A masterpiece' Madeleine Thien

sina (she/her) 

Tascha | alllora

Maria

i really enjoyed this overall. the writing is neat & really pulls you in. however, the general vagueness of the world-building and the plot itself - while managing to vividly add to the eeriness of the story and to make the general ambience more palpable - didn't really land either way for me. although i think this style is suitable, overall, for a story based on the premise of forgetting and things disappearing, i wish that this had been a more straightforward story in some parts. i do agree with most reviews that this was a quiet, introspective kind of dystopian novel, which is not a bad thing; i just itched for a little more of something.

Isabella 

this book is so interesting. very chilling and mysterious. got me thinking, "what is the point of this?" but i guess it's a very metaphorical book; a lot of interpretations can come up with this book. will be thinking about this for awhile bc it's quite scary in a way that some sort of stuff that happens in this book can and is happening in real life.

Elena Kuran

Very interesting and well written but just too bleak for me

Kimberly Gajitos

golde

my love for and fascination with deeply disturbing things need to be studied

n an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses - until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with no power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.

When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath the floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her wiring as the last way of preserving the past.

A Novel

Cait🪼

Yoko Ogawa writes with breathtaking attention to detail, so much so that you hardly notice how none of the characters are ever named (except pets). Ogawa crafts an identity for each individual, without labelling them - I grew to love the tender nature of 'the old man' and to sympathise with the protagonist's inability to hold on to her memories. It almost feels like an injustice to compare The Memory Police to Orwell's 1984 as Ogawa's dystopia is in a class of its own. 
The ending was heart-wrenching in the best possible way - I adored everything about this book.

interesting, captivating, easy to digest! left me feeling unsettled but so capturing and a great read

esther

It is a sad yet beautiful allegory on the inevitability of loss and the impermanence of memory. It delves into the somber realization that time washes through us like a crashing wave, along with our stories, our hopes and dreams.

James Bernabe

azliana aziz

some of the reviews here really be missing the whole point of ogawa's sangfroid narrative. why you want the sort of dark, edgy/punchy choked on misery narrative when you can do impermanence in the most gentle and serene way.

Cody Degen

The prose felt very, for lack of a better word, sparse, in a way that I felt matched the content of the book in a really successful way

mic shulman

good evening my heart feels hollow and broken

dnf at 58%. it was okay but then *minor spoiler alert* the main character kissed a guy whose wife just had a BABY and im really uncomfortable with reading anything about infidelity so. i lost interest immediately. it was also kinda boring that i actually considered dnf-ing before i even got to the kiss part. 2.5 stars rounded down to 2

diya

Dystopian at its finest, it was just a very strange little story. At first, trying to undertsand what and how it would all blend in together, what stood out the most was how something as small and insignificant as a flower petal has the potential to trigger a powerful memory. What irks you is how even in an Orwelian world, be it by brute force, or just plain submission, the crowd holds the power to everything. An easy flowing tone, gathering all the bits and pieces of the narrator's life, its all blends well. While it does bother me that by the end you're left with more questions than answers, sometimes, maybe its those moments and instances that makes an ending perfect?

Nicholas Barnard

a quiet and dream-like meditation on the dangers of forgetting and the capacity for kindness.

jess

The Memory Police is a masterpiece: a deep pool that can be experienced as fable or allegory, warning and illumination. It is a novel that makes us see differently, opening up its ideas in inconspicuous ways, knowing that all moments of understanding and grace are fleeting. It is political and human, it makes no promises. It is a rare work of patient and courageous vision. However, the ending is quite ungraspable for me. As in no way of understanding, only filled with immense sense of loss and more of the sense of wanting to cherish things that still exist and sometimes was just left uncared of. This novel is a masterpiece indeed. Even with the ungraceful ending, it just taught us more what we should start looking out for.

THE MEMORY POLICE left me with a permanent ghost in my mind from the minute I turned the last page. I was out of sorts, a confusion of feelings, by the time I finished it. This wasn't the first time I've experienced a narrative speaking of how memories are terrible things to lose, the first one being Studio Ghibli's 'Spirited Away', but 'The Memory Police' impresses a far darker thought: that even death seems better than the loss of memories. 

On this eerie, isolated island, narrated by Ogawa's beautifully haunting writing, the seemingly mundane objects are disappeared [thus, the clever play of grammar by Ogawa and the translator, Stephen Snyder; "were disappeared"—a passive voice—instead of "disappeared"—an active one] by an authoritarian government, resulting in a mass amnesia occurring across the island. Each time a memory of an object is disappeared everyone must remove them physically, manually from their lives, making the process all the more painful and real. The novelist who remains to be unnamed is swept in this tide which she cannot pull out of. Being so used to the main characters being "special" or "unlike others", it frightened me to also be pulled under the relentless tide of disappearing memories. Another written by the narrator, of a mute typist lovesick for her teacher who holds her captive in a tower chamber filled with broken typewriters, seems to accompany the main narrative, intensifying the chilling horror of the loss of control over your body and mind.

Other than clever, subtle hints of foreshadowing scattered across the pages and fitted in foreboding symbolisms, one of the things I love most about this book is the loose grasp of identity of the characters. We are given little to no names of the people whose stories we are reading. Yet this lack of identity suggests that memories are what shape us. Our memories breathe life and warmth into our soul. Without them, it becomes cold, numb. And no matter how hard you try to rub feeling into it, it's like pressing into molded clay, or tossing a pebble into a bottomless swamp. I definitely recommend you to give this a read.

fairuza hanun

THE MEMORY POLICE left me with a permanent ghost in my mind from the minute I turned the last page. I was out of sorts, a confusion of feelings, by the time I finished it. This wasn't the first time I've experienced a narrative speaking of how memories are terrible things to lose, the first one being Studio Ghibli's 'Spirited Away', but 'The Memory Police' impresses a far darker thought: that even death seems better than the loss of memories. 

On this eerie, isolated island, narrated by Ogawa's beautifully haunting writing, the seemingly mundane objects are disappeared [thus, the clever play of grammar by Ogawa and the translator, Stephen Snyder; "were disappeared"—a passive voice—instead of "disappeared"—an active one] by an authoritarian government, resulting in a mass amnesia occurring across the island. Each time a memory of an object is disappeared everyone must remove them physically, manually from their lives, making the process all the more painful and real. The novelist who remains to be unnamed is swept in this tide which she cannot pull out of. Being so used to the main characters being "special" or "unlike others", it frightened me to also be pulled under the relentless tide of disappearing memories. Another written by the narrator, of a mute typist lovesick for her teacher who holds her captive in a tower chamber filled with broken typewriters, seems to accompany the main narrative, intensifying the chilling horror of the loss of control over your body and mind.

Other than clever, subtle hints of foreshadowing scattered across the pages and fitted in foreboding symbolisms, one of the things I love most about this book is the loose grasp of identity of the characters. We are given little to no names of the people whose stories we are reading. Yet this lack of identity suggests that memories are what shape us. Our memories breathe life and warmth into our soul. Without them, it becomes cold, numb. And no matter how hard you try to rub feeling into it, it's like pressing into molded clay, or tossing a pebble into a bottomless swamp. I definitely recommend you to give this a read.

Mary Makarious

** spoiler alert **
           The Memory Police is a novel that explores the horrors of forgetting things one by one, before ultimately forgetting how to function as a person. 

I find myself conflicted about this book because I think the concept was fascinating, but the storytelling and execution were less than ideal. New concepts and newly forgotten things were constantly introduced without regard to older characters or situations being mentioned again. The characters never seemed to develop outside their one-dimensional introduction. We never get to hear what the Memory Police are doing, researching, where they take individuals, or the goal of wiping out memories. We don't get to hear why her mother might have saved certain items. Those who were returned by the memory police were fine, yet there's an overwhelming fear of interacting with them. The one family that decided to hide, we never hear about them again. We hear of people escaping, but no idea about the reprocussions. 

The reason I find this conflicting is the author herself seems like a young character, who's losing these memories alongside the rest of the island. Is this just supposed to serve as some diary entries, the perspective of this young and unreliable narrator - so we aren't getting the satisfaction of closure since she, too, is losing her faculties? I'm not sure.

Valeria M

my expectations were so high for this! so i guess it didn’t meet them but an interesting read to say the least

jess larry

Got me feeling all type of emotions, mostly anxiety & left me empty. 

Literally don’t know how to feel about the ending, there’s a hint of sadness, melancholy but a whole lot of nothingness, as if my soul got emptied. 

Definitely recommend !

renni

"Você sabia que, se cortarmos as antenas de um inseto com uma tesoura ele imediatamente fica quietinho? Torna-se hesitante, começa a andar em círculos, para de se alimentar. É a mesma coisa. No momento em que você perde a voz, perde também a capacidade de dar forma a si mesma."

Durante minha leitura eu não sabia se estava gostando ou não do que lia. Eu estava naquela área cinzenta o tempo todo.

Eu estava gostando pela forma lírica da história ser contada. Não tinha exatamente um plot. A vida nesse universo distópico só estava acontecendo e a gente estava assistindo através da personagem.

E as vezes eu não estava gostando justamente por isso. Nada realmente acontecia. Porque estão sumindo com as memórias? Porque e como isso afeta alguns e não outros? Porque nada parecia que realmente tinha um peso?

Depois de terminar creio que entendi por completo e posso concluir que eu gostei da história. 

O ritmo monótono num universo tão caótico é quase um (des)equilíbrio perfeito. O apego e medo de algo não palpável e incontrolável assusta. Não existiu nada tão genuíno quanto o relacionamento dos três personagens. A sua voz nunca realmente some.

Enfim, foi um livro bem interessante (e não que venha ao caso mas gostei mais do que 1984). Gosto quando tudo acontece no nada.

This had such an interesting and unique premise, but the implementation was simply weird. It kinda matches the scheme of the book, but I think especially the ending would’ve been much more meaningful, If I had more reasons to sympathize with the characters. They all seemed pretty bland and distant.

Tabea

altlovesbooks

Another example of a book's premise being far more interesting than the book itself. You live on an island where you wake up one day and something from your life has just vanished. The first incident in the book involves birds, so everyone woke up and suddenly the concept of "bird" holds no meaning. You don't remember what a bird was, you don't know what a bird is, all knowledge of "bird" is removed by the Memory Police. Holding onto past concepts like birds, flowers, calendars, is forbidden, and it's considered taboo to reminisce or talk about items that have been "disappeared". As the book progresses, the disappeared items take the form of increasingly important and valuable things, and while disoriented and discomfited, the people are expected and encouraged to take it in stride and move on.

Certain people are immune to this, where they retain all memories and knowledge of things that have been disappeared, and if discovered by the Memory Police, these people are taken away and never seen again. Our main character is not one of these people, but does hide away her editor as he is one of these people. Romance blooms as romance does in books like these, and the editors tries his best to make the main character remember things that had been lost and realize how awful things truly are. 

It's a very dystopian novel, and one without any real satisfying answers or conclusion. We never find out who or what the Memory Police act on behalf of, or why these things are being removed. I gather the novel is about how complacency is a creeping, insidious beast (the things disappeared start out innocuous and easily missed and slowly ramp up in importance and meaning as the story progresses), and that people should never just accept things as they are, but honestly the book came off boring and incomplete. This would've had more meaning if we had more reason to care about the people and their fate.

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.

3.5 stars I think. Very intriguing plot and overall a great book. It's just that I quite honestly don't know what to make of the book after finishing it. I think this was the author's intention and even if not, I appreciate the fact that it happened so, ultimately, I think my confusion and inability to describe my feelings for this book is a positive thing. It's a 'you have to read it and see for yourself' kind of situation.

The Memory Police

Reviews

Highlights