Reading Order
The Memory Police Reading Order
Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police (1994, translated by Stephen Snyder in 2019) is the Japanese literary novel set on an unnamed island where things disappear — birds, roses, ferry boats, calendars — and with them, the islanders' memory of those things. The unnamed narrator, a novelist, watches as more and more things vanish and the Memory Police enforce the disappearances, while she helps hide her editor, who unlike most islanders retains his memories of everything that is lost. A meditation on loss, language, and what remains when everything familiar has been erased, it became an international literary sensation when translated in 2019.
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The Memory Police
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The Memory Police
Yoko Ogawa·1994·Stand-alone. Ogawa's other translated novels include The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003) and Hotel Iris (1996), both available in English translation.
The Memory Police — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Memory Police about?
The Memory Police is set on an unnamed island where objects periodically disappear from the world — birds one day, roses the next, then ferry boats, then calendars — and simultaneously disappear from the islanders' memories. The narrator, an unnamed novelist, watches the disappearances while hiding her editor in a secret room beneath her house, because he, unusually, retains his memories of everything that vanishes. The novel is partly a domestic thriller, partly a meditation on language and loss: as more things disappear, the narrator finds she can no longer write certain words, because the things they refer to no longer exist.
Is The Memory Police science fiction or literary fiction?
The Memory Police is generally classified as literary fiction or magical realism rather than science fiction — it shares more with Kafka and Borges than with conventional science fiction, and its interest is philosophical and emotional rather than in explaining the mechanism of the disappearances. Its premise is fantastic but the novel treats it as matter-of-fact, the way Kafka's The Metamorphosis treats a man waking as an insect. Readers who love Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Never Let Me Go's dystopian emotional mode, or Ursula K. Le Guin's literary science fiction, tend to find The Memory Police congenial.
Should I read The Memory Police before or after The Unconsoled?
The Memory Police and The Unconsoled (Kazuo Ishiguro) are frequently paired as companion novels about dreamlike worlds with unstable rules, but there is no reading order relationship between them — they are by different authors writing in different languages for different reasons. Readers who love one should try the other, and readers who find Ishiguro's The Unconsoled too long and diffuse often find The Memory Police more accessible as an introduction to the same kind of dreamlike uncanny literary fiction.
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