The Memory Police

1
I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first ­among all the things that have vanished from the island.
 
Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here, my mother used to tell me when I was still a child. Transparent things, fragrant things . . . fluttery ones, bright ones . . . wonderful things you can t possibly imagine.
 
It s a shame that the people who live here haven t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that s just the way it is on this island. Things go on disappearing, one by one. It won t be long now, she added. You ll see for yourself. Something will disappear from your life.
 
Is it scary? I asked her, suddenly anxious.
 
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.
 
My mother would talk like this only when we were in her studio in the basement. It was a large, dusty, rough-­floored room, built so close to the river on the north side that you could clearly hear the sound of the current. I would sit on the little stool that was reserved for my use, as my mother, a sculptor, sharpened a chisel or polished a stone with her file and talked on in her quiet voice.
 
The island is stirred up after a disappearance. People gather in little groups out in the street to talk about their memories of the thing that s been lost. There are regrets and a certain sadness, and we try to comfort one another. If it s a physical object that has been disappeared, we gather the remnants up to burn, or bury, or toss into the river. But no one makes much of a fuss, and it s over in a few

Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Her works include The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas; The Housekeeper and the Professor; Hotel Iris; and Revenge. She lives in Hyogo.

Unforgettable. . . . A masterful work of speculative fiction.   Chicago Tribune

Ogawa s fable echoes the themes of George Orwell s 1984, Ray Bradbury s Fahrenheit 451, and Gabriel García Márquez s One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it has a voice and power all its own. Time

A masterpiece. . . . A novel that makes us see differently. . . . It is a rare work of patient and courageous vision. The Guardian

A feat of dark imagination . . . an intimate, suspenseful drama of courage and endurance. The Wall Street Journal

[A] masterly novel. The New Yorker

An elegantly spare dystopian fable. . . . It tingles with dread.   The New York Times Book Review

Quietly devastating . . . Ogawa finds new ways to express old anxieties about authoritarianism, environmental depredation and humanity s willingness to be complicit in its own demise. The Washington Post
 
Timely, provocative reading . . . A harrowing parable about the importance of memory and the profound danger of cultural amnesia.   Esquire
 
One of my favorite novels of the decade. . . . It s a perfect correction to the overwrought politico-apocalyptic fiction so fashionable in These Times. . . . It clarifies all the things our wired society muddles, especially, and most profoundly, the saving grace of the human touch.   Hillary Kelly, Vulture
 
Profoundly powerful. . . . It has the timelessness of a fable, yet feels like an urgent warning about the need for resistance in a world that seems all too quick to forget the lessons of the past.   The A.V. Club
 
A searing, vividly imagined novel by a wildly talented writer . . . Dark and ambitious. Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
The novel is particularly resonant now, at a time of rising authoritarianism across the globe. Throughout the book, citizens live under police surveillance. Novels are burned. People are detained and