Recommendations
Books Like The Memory Police
Best books to read after The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police is the Japanese magical realist novel of things that vanish and memories that follow — an unnamed island, a novelist, an editor in hiding. These recommendations continue the Ogawa canon, explore the tradition of the Japanese literary novel and the dreamlike dystopian novel, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the book about what language and memory mean when the things they refer to disappear.
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The Housekeeper and the Professor
by Yoko Ogawa
The companion Ogawa — a mathematician with an eighty-minute memory employs a housekeeper and befriends her son, with baseball serving as the thread of communication; the other widely read Ogawa novel in English and the one most often recommended for readers who loved The Memory Police.
- 2Buy
Hotel Iris
by Yoko Ogawa
The darker companion Ogawa — a seventeen-year-old girl at her mother's hotel in a seaside town who enters into a sadomasochistic relationship with an older translator; shows a different side of Ogawa's talent, her interest in power, obsession, and the body, and gives a more complete picture of her range.
- 3Buy
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
The English literary dystopia companion — Kathy H. and her friends at Hailsham, raised as organ donors; shares The Memory Police's dreamlike quality and its interest in characters who know and don't know the full truth about their situation and who accept their circumstances with a gentleness that the reader finds heartbreaking.
- 4Buy
The Unconsoled
by Kazuo Ishiguro
The dream-logic companion — Ryder the pianist in a Central European city where space and time behave according to dream logic; shares The Memory Police's quality of a world with different rules from our own that the narrator accepts as normal, and its interest in loss and the impossibility of fulfilling one's obligations.
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The Trial
by Franz Kafka
The foundational literary predecessor — Josef K. arrested for an unspecified crime in a world where the law is opaque and unknowable; the prototype for The Memory Police's world of arbitrary, inexplicable power and a narrator who cannot understand the rules of the system that is destroying him.
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Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke
The companion literary novel of a character who accepts a strange world as normal — Piranesi in his labyrinthine house of infinite halls and statues; shares The Memory Police's quality of a narrator who inhabits a world with different rules from our own and whose acceptance of those rules the reader finds both sad and beautiful.
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
by Haruki Murakami
The companion Japanese literary novel of a world where things happen that cannot be explained — Toru Okada searching for a lost cat, pulled into a mystery that reaches back to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria; the Japanese literary novel most often cited alongside Ogawa's as the territory of the unexplained and the irrecoverable.
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The Buried Giant
by Kazuo Ishiguro
The companion literary novel about collective forgetting — a post-Arthurian Britain blanketed by a mist that erases memory; shares The Memory Police's central question of what happens to a society when the things that define it begin to disappear from collective consciousness.
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