You'll spend miles of trail taking inventory of everything you'd hate to forget.
The Memory Police
On an unnamed island, objects and the memories of them mysteriously disappear while a novelist secretly shelters someone who can still remember.
293g
Weighs the same as Camp Sandals + Headlamp + Sunscreen
- Luxury Item
- Past Bedtime
- Fiction
Yōko Ogawa published this in Japan in 1994, and it was translated into English to acclaim a quarter century later. There is an unnamed island where things (hats, birds, roses...) quietly disappear. And not only the things: also the memory of them, with the Memory Police there to enforce the forgetting. But a novelist is hiding someone who still remembers. After this book, you'll spend miles of trail taking inventory of everything you'd hate to forget.
Field notes
Ogawa has said that The Diary of a Young Girl inspired her to become a writer, and The Memory Police began partly as a tribute to Anne Frank. The rain falling as the narrator leads her editor into hiding deliberately echoes the downpour that concealed the Frank family's journey to their secret annex. Ogawa initially conceived the persecution of people who remember and the disappearance of ordinary objects as separate ideas; bringing them together gave the novel its shape. What English-language readers embraced as a prescient dystopia was, for its author, an exploration of the freedom to write when the world is determined to silence you.