Yoko Ogawa’s new novel takes us to a Japanese island where things keep disappearing: ribbons, birds, musical instruments, fruit. People, too, are at the mercy of the Memory Police, an efficient lot hunting for those who can’t shake off their memories. Each disappearance involves not just getting rid of the physical object, but also of every trace of it in everyone’s mind. The unnamed narrator’s mother is among the disappeared, but things she collected remain in the house where the daughter still lives, writing novels about people losing something. ‘Everyone likes that sort of thing,’ she says of her books, as if to imply that every island has the writers it deserves.
It’s tempting to see the book as a remake of Nineteen Eighty-Four, although here the regime is more humane: there are no betrayals or torture, and brainwashing is not entirely the fault of the police.
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