The finale of Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police is not a happy one, best B. Like the protagonist of her unpublished novel, the protagonist gradually loses abilities and body parts; they are disappeared. Here, the protagonist describes the people’s reaction to the disappearance of left legs: “Gradually we became accustomed to living without our legs. Needless to say, things did not go back to the way they had been before, not exactly, but our bodies acquired a new sense of balanc

Two posts ago, I mentioned that the unnamed protagonist of Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, is a fiction writer. That's right, Ms. Ogawa, who is a fiction writer, has written a novel about a woman writing a novel (Ow! My head hurts). In fact, her writing is central to the story and is quoted at length—always in italics. Her editor, identified as R, is the man she shelters in a hidden room in her house, as he is one of those people able to remember disappeared things and is thu

In my first post on Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, I mentioned that the book was tagged as being science fiction, dystopian fiction and psychological fiction and that these actions were largely marketing tools. Yes, I believe so. The idea, on Amazon, is that busy shoppers will, if they want a science fiction book, click on the site’s Science Fiction tab and one of the book’s they’ll see is The Memory Police. Well, I don’t want to be grumpy about this; it may work perfectly w

Last time, we began looking at The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. Let’s continue. It is of note that the first page or so—the section I quoted last time—tells the whole story. In that way, it is a sort of mise en abyme, an embedded story, although I believe, strictly speaking, mise en abymes don’t usually appear straight off. It’s more of a prologue that introduces the story. Anyhow, the narrator/protagonist remembers her now deceased mother telling her that, on the island, thi

This week, a new novel, Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police. This story was originally published in 1994 in Japanese and then translated to English and re-published in English in 2019. The book’s title was re-done; the Japanese original translates to Secret Crystallization or Quiet Crystallization which, as we will see, has meaning (so does The Memory Police). The novel was nominated for a 2020 Booker International Prize and a 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature. We