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The Memory Police

An enthralling Japanese dystopia you’ll never forget

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The Memory Police

By: Yoko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder - translator
Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
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Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020, an enthralling Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance from one of Japan's greatest writers.
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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?
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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

©2019 Yoko Ogawa (P)2023 Penguin Audio

 Dystopian Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Science Fiction World Literature
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Critic reviews

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 (Madeleine Thien)
It's an age since I read a book as strange, beautiful and affecting… this haunting work reaches beyond…to examine what it is to be human… a remarkable writer
Masterly...Like Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, Yoko Ogawa's novel transforms a familiar metaphor into imaginative truth. (Jia Tolentino)
In a feat of dark imagination, Yoko Ogawa stages an intimate, suspenseful drama of courage and endurance while conjuring up a world that is at once recognizable and profoundly strange
Explores questions of power, trauma and state surveillance...particularly resonant now, at a time of rising authoritarianism across the globe.
The fresh take on 1984 you didn't know you needed.
This is a work of immense precision that is drawing on allegory, that is drawing on myth, that is drawing on dystopia and is doing that deftly. It is the work of a Japanese master who transcends her cultural context to speak to us on a level that is universal.
The acclaimed Japanese writer’s fifth English release is an elegantly spare dystopian fable...Reading The Memory Police is like sinking into a snowdrift: lulling yet suspenseful, it tingles with dread and incipient numbness.
Ogawa exploits the psychological complexity of…[a] bizarre situation to impressive effect… her achievement is to weave in a far more personal sense of the destruction and distortion of the psyche
One of Japan’s most acclaimed authors explores truth, state surveillance and individual autonomy. Ogawa’s fable echoes the themes of George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, but it has a voice and power all its own.
All stars
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weird story very trippy, interesting concept playing with the idea of thing disappearing almost philosophical idea to play with. but the story takes ages to warm up and then ending is unsatisfying. some of the charter development needs work like R and the main character story arch feels incomplete. also u don't get a satisfactory explanation for what the world is the way it is.

interesting concept playing with the idea of thing disappearin

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Very Orwellian concept, but far too slow. Doesn't really give context to what's happening - felt it was a good idea but not necessarily executed well

Not as good as it could've been

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Story great. Well written and performed. Didn’t like the ending. But otherwise really enjoyed it

Well written, no ending

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I was absolutely hooked on this book. The narration was excellent and kept me engrossed the whole way through, though at times the plot got a bit side-tracked I thought. The premise was really interesting and thought-provoking, but sometimes I felt frustrated or that something was lacking - particularly at the end - as there were so many unanswered questions which although left me thinking, also left me frustrated - was there someone responsible, someone who maybe benefited from it, someone who engineered everything on purpose as it seems - or did the human race just get too arrogant and destroy itself?

Brilliant, thought-provoking, sometimes lacking

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I generally hate it when authors set out to write a "thing" rather than a story that happens to convey a meaning and I'm not entirely sure if this does or doesn't entirely fit within my definition of a "thing."

You know that old adage about how, the bigger the topic you want to write about, the smaller the writing? You don't talk about bombs with napalm falling from the sky, or endless fire, you talk about the young child's sock half burnt on the charred road. This is what The Memory Police feels like. It chooses a world where something monumental is happening and it merely takes you through the motions of a young novelist's life.

You don't build a relationship to the three main characters, they always stay somehow distant from you. The narrator is never named, nor is the old man, and R, the narrator's editor, doesn't get more than a letter to define him. But in a way, it's that distance that makes this quietly disturbing. Like comedy, you find the characters in a circle of hell from which they have no escape, nor do most of them have an understanding of being in a circle of hell. Only you, the casual observer can realise the enormity of their disturbing lives. And like comedy, the ending doesn't grant a cathartic release.

But this isn't a comedy, far from it. The Memory Police are brutal only in their strictness and their efficiency. They don't beat people up, they don't shout at them outside of their investigations. They merely work effectively to ensure that the rules are followed and that disappeared objects are removed from the island. We don't get any political discourse, no discussion about whomever might be in charge. There's only the disappearances without any announcements or explanations and their strict enactment. And isn't that terrifying?

To me at least, the removed observation of the plot slowly progressing towards its inevitable conclusion is worthy of the horror genre, even though there's never any gore nor fear from the characters. R is committed to keeping our narrator alive and helping her remember, even when she's slowly letting go, accepting that she can only be what she is allowed to be.

There's maybe social commentary here about resistance, about considering it and making an effort even in the face of insurmountable difficulty.

Because of the way that the author approached the storytelling, the pacing is necessarily slow and I can see people getting impatient with it especially without a strong connection to the characters. But I felt that the plot makes up for it in capturing the imagination and making you wonder just where it will all land. I couldn't see it, even though I worried about it since about 50% in. And that, too, is quite pleasant.

All in all? Probably not a book for all, but if you enjoyed 1984, and if you have had other experiences with the more slow paced Asian setting books, then I think you might find this at least intriguing if not full on engrossing.

I have the same quiet horror completing it that I had after finishing Neal Shursterman's Unwind, which left me fairly scarred from a philosophical perspective.

Hellish and inescapable

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