Hope is a silent revolution for the oppressed, as Yoko Ogawa's newly translated "The Memory Police" reveals. In the novel, originally published in 1994, Ogawa lays open a hushed defiance against a totalitarian regime by training her prodigious talent on magnifying the efforts of those who persistently but quietly rebel.
The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa, Translated by Stephen Snyder.288 pagesPANTHEON, Fiction.
The book finds our unnamed narrator, a novelist on an unnamed island, dispassionately recording the gradual loss of objects and the memories associated with them. Disappeared items include the mundane, like calendars or candies; the precious, like emeralds or books; and the living, like roses or birds.