Beautifully translated by Stephen Snyder, “The Memory Police” is a deeply disturbing read, full of intimate interactions and piercing insight centered on a novelist under an authoritarian surveillance state as increasingly essential objects vanish one by one. Yoko Ogawa’s dystopian tale of a woman living on an island where the clinical and ruthless Memory Police make objects ‘disappear’ was inspired by the diary of Anne Frank. The narrator has hidden R in a secret room beneath her floorboards to protect him from the Memory Police, who invariably find and remove those who can remember from sight and society. The unnamed narrator of “The Memory Police” poses this question to R, one of the rare individuals who can remember objects made to disappear. “How does it feel to remember everything? To have everything that the rest of us have lost saved up in your heart?”
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