The Memory Police is finely translated by Stephen Snyder and reaches English-language readers as if sent from the future. Ogawa’s weightless and unadorned prose weaves a world where memory is always associative; we remember not just the object itself but what it conjures ... The Memory Police doesn’t lend itself to easy analysis; we cannot say the state is Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Nazi Germany, or wrap the novel neatly around any specific historical amnesia ... While a reader may feel the need to interpret it solely as a political novel, the book also reads, accurately and passionately, as a profound meditation on dying ... When the story arrives at its fruition, its power seems to come out of the thin air and thin existence in which its characters are trapped. Yet the force of its ending is cumulative and phenomenal, and taps into the very source and meaning of memory. The Memory Police is a masterpiece ... It is a rare work of patient and courageous vision.
In her newest novel, 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.
Although the Memory Police could become the stuff of cheap Orwellian horror, Ogawa avoids this trap by consistently presenting them with a calm, chilling understatement that repeatedly catches us off guard. Here as throughout the novel, Ogawa’s imagery is empowered by the beauty and simplicity of her prose, which, in this elegant translation by Stephen Snyder, evokes a mood of elegiac sadness that blankets the twists and turns of the story and lingers long after the novel ends in inevitable dissolution ... Ogawa offers no explanations for the inexplicable 'laws of the island.' None are needed ... The richness of characterization, the subtly poetic imagery, and the strangely compelling nature of the leisurely plot make The Memory Police singularly unforgettable.
Handy political parallels are just the beginning of its charms ... shifts subtly from whatdunit to howcouldit, Ogawa's spare and affecting prose leaving ample room for the dread to creep in ... a lovely, if bleak, meditation on faith and creativity—or faith in creativity—in a world that disavows both ... The newfound magic of The Memory Police is the way it gives form to that near-panicked acceleration ... truly feels like a portrait of today. To await the future is to disappear the present—which only accelerates the speed with which now turns to then, and then turns to nothing.
...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. The story accrues in unhurried layers of coolly reported routine ... Rarely has the relationship between author and editor felt more fraught with consequence ... The Memory Police expounds no politics ... There are book burnings and a special class of scapegoats, but the novel shares less with dystopian classics like Fahrenheit 451 or The Handmaid’s Tale than it does with the novels of Samuel Beckett; or, in Japanese literature, Kobo Abe, whose landmark 1962 novel, The Woman in the Dunes, is also a story of surreally escalating diminishment. The effect isn’t solipsistic. Rather, Ogawa’s ruminant style captures the alienation of being alive as the world’s ecosystems, ice sheets, languages, animal species and possible futures vanish more quickly than any one mind can apprehend.
It’s tempting to see the book as a remake of Nineteen Eighty-Four although here the regime is more humane: there are no betrayals or torture, and brainwashing is not entirely the fault of the police ... In Stephen Snyder’s fluid translation, the names of vanished things are sometimes italicised, sometimes put in quotation marks. The things themselves are sometimes completely forgotten, sometimes not ... When it comes to human memory, it seems, no one — not even those trying to police it — can ever remember everything.
This is Ms. Ogawa at her most fervent, preoccupied with what it means to be human; to imagine, to remember, to love ... the reader may wince a little ... declarations are undeniably clunky and their weight might have sunk a more conventional narrative. But in Ms. Ogawa’s cunningly structured and delicately layered novel, such passionate outbursts are sparingly deployed and oddly touching. Like splashes of color in a wintry landscape, they not only relieve the bleakness but also prove that something as fragile as emotion can resist annihilation ... Her measured, compressed sentences seem intended to tranquilize rather than excite. In complete control of the reader’s attention, she fixes it one moment on the hands of a corpse, or the texture of a flower, then the next on the ineffable, fleetingly grasped ... emerging from Ms. Ogawa’s latest creation feels like waking up to find an unsettling dream sliding just out of memory.
...[a] quietly devastating novel ... Ogawa writes with a direct, understated style that enhances the uncanniness of the events she describes. Her flat tone matches the passivity of most of the island’s inhabitants, which in turn suggests a capitulation to deeply buried personal and societal trauma ... Fortunately, Ogawa’s wry humor keeps The Memory Police from drowning in its own gloom ... Ogawa finds new ways to express old anxieties about authoritarianism, environmental depredation and humanity’s willingness to be complicit in its own demise.
...this is a Japanese novel — so for anyone looking for thrills, I'd like to warn you that despite the tagline 'Orwellian' on the back cover of the book, this reads much more like a surrealist drama. A very quiet drama, at that ... The overall feeling is like staring at falling snow over long stretches of time, which, frankly, will make those people with more literary proclivities quite happy, and those who want commercial science fiction quite frustrated. If anything, the book clearly shows the contrast between two different types of writing. We are used to the American style of science fiction, while Ogawa is playing with another deck. Her intent is to analyze not only memory but the creative process — we read parts of a novel in progress which the protagonist is tackling — using very precise language. At times the result is something hauntingly sad, and at others it felt like my feet were being glued to the ground ... There's also a timelessness to the novel which didn't strike me until the end ... If you view The Memory Police as one big, fat metaphor for state control — and I'm sure many people will see it as that — you'll probably find more pleasure in it than if you attempt to consider it in other terms. It's an odd book, not entirely satisfying, but at the same time I have an interest in all things odd. Maybe you do too, in which case it might be, ah, pun intended, memorable.
Ogawa's straightforward, realistic presentation, with her narrator leading a more or less normal life, compounds the disturbing feel of the story, as more and more absences take hold, the world narrowed down yet people still getting on with things more or less like always, as they accept whatever befalls them and soldier on. It's a bizarre variation on the usual totalitarian dystopia ... This is a deeper, richer tale, a story that is more than just one describing brutal suppression by a police-like force in an isolated locale. Ogawa's novel looks, at first glance, small, in how it is limited to this narrator and her fairly simple life -- itself constricting evermore around her -- and narrated in such a straightforward manner, but really, it's a remarkably broad dark vision she presents ... A resonant and satisfyingly unsettling work, The Memory Police is a very well-crafted piece of (hitting-maybe-too-close-to-home) fantasy, rich with (but also not needing) possible allegorical meanings. A very fine piece of work.
Readers should ask themselves what happens once the meaning of words is removed or regulated. How does this impact our ability to write and tell stories, to tell the truth? The most eerie thing about Ogawa’s story is that we don’t find out the answers to these questions ... There’s a metatextual element to The Memory Police that can, at times, take away from the characters’ journey. Perhaps not enough space was given to these parallel character’s development ... Still, though—you’re in good hands with Ogawa ... She’s patient with her story, letting it unfold along with its small cast, details revealed in due course. She could have written a political thriller but opts instead for a closer look at communities under siege by the very political forces that should be protecting them ... Ogawa hits on something real in her novel.
... feels like a desperate scream for readers to internalize its truths and take action ... While there are a few details that ground the story in Ogawa’s native Japan, the sparseness of the narrative makes The Memory Police feel like a fairy tale that could be set anywhere. The book is practically a novelization of German pastor Martin Niemoller’s post-World War II poem First they came …, but the environmental effects of the disappearances of things like roses and fruit make Ogawa’s prose feel applicable not just to political atrocities like genocide but to climate change or any other crisis made worse by general complacency ... a poignant examination about how struggles and people are interconnected and the fact that security is not enough to hope for.
The incredibly prolific Ogawa...is masterful at telling complex narratives with awe-inspiring simplicity. It’s never really explained how the Memory Police erases these objects and memories. Instead, Ogawa entices the reader to look at this odd world from the perspective of her narrator: accepting what’s happening and adjusting accordingly. Other authors might crank the emotional drama up to 11, but Ogawa’s characters never boil over, despite the dire circumstances ... While the reign of terror enacted by our current administration will probably (eventually? hopefully?) pass, Ogawa’s book is a simple, but powerful reminder of the forces—both political and sociological—that have been and always will be intent on taking away our most meaningful rights, and at a pace that’s so glacial, we hardly notice until they’re gone. The Memory Police is a thoughtful, brilliantly written wake-up call.
... an enigmatic, uncanny, and richly rewarding novel ... While we can safely presume Ogawa’s political leanings are anti-fascist, the marketing conceals what might otherwise be presented as a prismatic and multilayered work of literature, one that is insistent on avoiding easy answers to the questions it poses ... In terms of narrative, The Memory Police shares more in common with The Diary of Anne Frank than novels like Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World ... Antagonists can give protagonists a sense of direction, so with no one for the protagonists to come together and rail against the narrative risks feeling rudderless. But Ogawa’s novel is better for it: the struggle to maintain normalcy and continue to be kind and helpful to your friends and family in the face of subjugation and loss becomes central, leaving little room for vapid action. There is much more about the magic of the mundane here than there is action in any traditional sense ... the characters’ sensory perception of what’s lost and forgotten unlocks a history, flooding the work with nostalgia and melancholy but also sweeter and more playful sentiments as well ... remarkably layered and rich without feeling cluttered, or as if loose ends aren’t tied up ... was written almost 30 years ago but still taps into the anxieties and concerns of present-day readers ... What little there is in the way of a concrete ethic is there firmly, but without drawing unnecessary attention to itself. Ogawa, thankfully, is never in the business of sermonizing or preaching ... we’re fortunate to have more work by such a uniquely gifted and idiosyncratic writer who has yet to gain the wider readership she deserves in the English-speaking world.
What really stands out, though, about Ogawa’s dystopia is the sense of quiet hopelessness. It’s not so much that the Memory Police have quashed all resistance – though they’re ruthlessly efficient in suppressing those who do remember – it’s that the disappearances are utterly random, with seemingly no person or entity in control of what vanishes ... I know this all sounds unbelievably depressing, but the fable-like quality of the prose, unassuming, gentle, and totally devoid of cynicism, makes this a very accessible novel. The book is also leavened by a number of bright spots, whether it’s the burgeoning love between the narrator and the editor, or her father/daughter relationship with the old man, or the incredible moment when the narrator tastes a lemon drop for the first time since their disappearance.
Through the perspective of a novelist, The Memory Police illustrates the fear of being eroded until the self becomes 'a hollow heart full of holes,' and writing as a medium of expression that, though unable to counteract that loss, nevertheless allows one to tell their tales ... Scrappy as memory may be, and although reality cannot be reconstructed as it was, Ogawa emphasizes the importance of bearing witness to the past all the same.
Ogawa exploits the psychological complexity of this bizarre situation to impressive effect, overlaying its natural tension with sexual ambiguity and a sense that the lines between safety and captivity are being blurred ... A work of fiction that sets itself such stringent boundaries and problems of internal logic (if the inhabitants of the island have their concepts of items entirely wiped from their sensibilities, how are they able to name them? How does a milliner know what he once was when hats have disappeared?) must eventually reach a reckoning. Ogawa brings hers about in a deeply unsettling fashion, plunging her imaginary world into entropy and post-apocalyptic decay. There are obviously parallels between the society she describes and those similarly intolerant of collective memory and will, but her achievement is to weave in a far more personal sense of the destruction and distortion of the psyche.
The novel is surreally dystopian, except that while people grumble about the sinking quality of life, they do not expressly regret the loss of things they have forgotten...The jacket copy says the novel is 'Orwellian', but there is no double-speak here, no attempt by an overweening State for absolute control, no obvious attempt at political manipulation ... Ogawa does require of the reader a certain suspension of logic if not belief. Exactly how this small cut-off island society functions economically is unclear; to remark on this isn’t pedantry, because markets, businesses and occupations feature prominently in the narrative. The unnamed protagonist is herself an author with an editor and publisher; this would hardly seem to be viable at the best of times, but it becomes increasingly fantastical when the disappearances force the economy into reliance on increasingly impoverished market gardens and individual artisans ... Ogawa does follow Orwell in the clarity of her prose—at least in Stephen Snyder’s stylish translation—and the ability to create familiar and recognizable characters in a distorted reality.
As fantastical as the premise of her latest anglophoned novel seems, Ogawa intends exactly that universality ... Ogawa’s anointed translator, 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.
Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities ... Technical details about the disappearances remain intentionally vague. The author instead stays close to her protagonist’s emotions and the disorientation she and her neighbors struggle with each day. Passages from the narrator’s developing novel also offer fascinating glimpses into the way the changing world affects her unconscious mind ... A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.
The classic Ogawa hallmarks are here, a dark eroticism and idiosyncratic characters, but it’s also clear she’s expanded her range into something even deeper. This is a searing, vividly imagined novel by a wildly talented writer.
