anaisareads2day 's review for:

The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa

3.5

challenging mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

---

I hadn't heard much about The Memory Police before stumbling upon it at a Friends of the Library sale, but now that I’ve read it, I understand why it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s haunting, poetic, and quietly devastating.

Set on an unnamed island, the novel imagines a world where objects and the memories associated with them are systematically erased from both society and individual consciousness. 

These disappearances are enforced by the Memory Police, and once something vanishes, it must be forgotten entirely, as if it never existed. 
Even the act of remembering becomes dangerous.

The narrator, a novelist whose own profession is threatened by this erasure, exists in a strange limbo: caught between passive acceptance and the dangerous impulse to resist.

As she hides a man who can still remember what others cannot, her quiet rebellion becomes a deeply personal act of preservation.

To me, this is a metaphor for identity: how our own personal identity it is shaped by the objects, relationships, and stories we carry with us. The disappearances on the island are not just losses of items, but of the emotional and cultural fabric that connects people. Their forced absence reflects the ways in which oppressive systems, censorship, or even time itself can erase parts of who we are.

The Memory Police reads like a warning about the fragility of memory, and a reflection of what remains when so much is lost.