I'm not normally a fan of dystopian fiction, but I found this a powerful and unsettling read. Simply yet lyrically written , the writer - this is told in the first person - lives on an island in thrall to the Memory Police. Things comprehensively disappear: in the early days, simple things like roses, and the inhabitants soon lose any memories of the things that have vanished. Those unfortunate people who find they do not forget - and the writer's parents seem to have been among them - simply are removed by the Memory Police and never seen again. The 'writer' of this book is herself a novelist, and we are privy to her latest effort, involving a young typist whose story in some ways moves in parallel to the story the author is living through. She hides her editor in her house, because his memories do not fade, and he is therefore in danger... We never find out more about the Memory Police, or know to whom they are answerable. But we are left with a lot to think about - totalitarian regimes, life, death and the process of letting go and of dying. I'll go on thinking about his book. ( )

2.5 at best. Normally I love surrealism in literature and art, and the first half of this book was no exception, but by the end I was left with the same unanswered questions as the beginning, and ended up strongly disliking the narrator to boot. Though I understand there's supposed to be a deeper meaning symbolized by the surreal events happening on the island, I would've appreciated some hints on how the Memory Police came about, how the "disappearances" happen and are chosen... something! Instead, we just get a bunch of idle speculation. The time and setting are unclear, though the characters live similarly to how we do today, which gave me the impression that more details/worldbuilding were to follow. Grounding the story further might have driven its message home a little better, instead of the nebulous way it's delivered here.

Also, I was absolutely done with the main character when she risked everything for no reason by walking into the Memory Police headquarters (apparently without suffering any consequences though, so it's all excused I guess?) and somehow managed to ignore the repeated signs of an oncoming stroke in her friend the old man until the day he died of one (for context/contrast, she took the dog to the vet at the first sign of illness). I can understand unlikeable characters, but I cannot abide inconsistent or stupid ones, and the unnamed narrator of this book unfortunately happens to be both. In fact, she hardly qualifies as a main character for me because she takes a backseat in almost all the events that matter - she tells us what happens to her, what other people are doing (the old man does pretty much everything, for instance, when it comes to their rescue operation) carries on an icky affair with a married man she's hiding (contributing nothing whatsoever to the plot), and then just kind of fades away at the end. Good riddance, honestly. ( )

Another beyond weird translated book with an interesting concept! Though I feel this book holds the reader at a distance, for example, none of the characters have names. A novelist lives in a place where occasionally things disappear from the island. One day it's birds. One day it's roses... Interspersed with a bit of a novel that the character was writing makes it a bit more interesting. I don't regret reading it, but wish I had liked the execution better. ( )

Story: 6.0 / 10
Characters: 6
Setting: 8.5
Prose: 8 ( )

Any work where the main character is also an author stands on a tightrope and threatens to plunge into self-aggrandisement (looking at you [a:Stephen King|3389|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1362814142p2/3389.jpg]).
But it works very well here, a novel about what happens when the process of defamiliarization menaces a community like a monster out of a b-movie. Other reviews for Ogawa's novel focus on the arbitrariness of the Memory Police's rules and the political connection to cruel and absurd laws today, but to me the fact that nature itself collaborated with the authorities was more horrifying. The authorities were merely agents of some natural force that imposed insane restraints and demanded people recontextualize and relearn through these painful fetters. Anyone who's had music lessons or been to a writer's workshop can sympathize. ( )