12 Jun / The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder [in Booklist]
*STARRED REVIEW
Without names, these people, this island, could be anyone, anywhere. As fantastical as the premise of her latest Anglophoned novel seems, Yoko Ogawa (The Housekeeper and the Professor, 2009) intends exactly that universality. Initially, small things disappeared – “Ribbon, bell, emerald, stamp.” What didn’t just vanish was destroyed. And then people disappeared – those able to remember were removed by the Memory Police to ensure community uniformity.
A novelist, whose mother was a sculptor with secret-filled drawers, her father an ornithologist, lives alone while writing her latest book about a voiceless woman. When her editor reveals that his memories remain intact, the novelist immediately recognizes the danger. The novelist works with her trusted childhood nurse’s husband – now a daring duo – to build a hidden refuge in the novelist’s house. Then books disappear, the rest are burned; the single library, too. And still, the disappearing doesn’t stop.
Ogawa’s anointed translator, Stephen Snyder, adroitly captures the quiet control with which Ogawa gently unfurls her ominously surreal and Orwellian narrative. The Memory Police loom, their brutality multiplies, but Ogawa remarkably ensures that what lingers are the human(e) connections – building a communicating device with tubing, sharing pancake bites with a grateful dog, a birthday party. As the visceral disappears, somehow the spirit holds on.
Review: “Fiction,” Booklist, June 1, 2019
Readers: Adult
Published: 1994 (Japan), 2019 (United States)