FICTION

THE MEMORY POLICE

By Yoko Ogawa

Translated by Stephen Snyder

Random Books/ Paperback/ 288 pages/$27.95/ Books Kinokuniya / 4 Stars

Mysterious disappearances crop up in a number of contemporary Japanese novels, notably in Haruki Murakami's stories, reflecting perhaps existentialist fears or unease sparked by the abductions of Japanese citizens by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s.

In Yoko Ogawa's understated yet chilling book, the disappearances are willed by a faceless authority, represented by the memory police of the title.

First published in Japanese in 1994, the novel brings to mind George Orwell's 1984.

On an unnamed island, things - from ribbons to roses to birds - are systematically erased without explanation.

Residents simply wake up to a loss. "Lying still, eyes closed, ears pricked... You'll feel that something has changed from the night before, and you'll know that you've lost something, that something has been disappeared from the island."

It is an offence to remember the disappeared objects - and "dissidents" who hold on to the memories of these items are made to disappear, including the narrator's mother, who is never seen after being taken away by the police.

The very telling of this story, by the unnamed narrator, symbolises an act of resistance and attempt to hold on to her sense of self.

That the narrator is, in the book, an author who is racing to complete her novel before she loses her memories, makes her efforts all the more heroic.

As befitting a story about erasure, the world of the novel is hazy - characters and places remain unnamed and somewhat shapeless. The novel takes a while to get into as the characters seem vague and shadowy and can be rather hard to relate to.

But the book succeeds in building up an atmosphere of fear and foreboding, as people who harbour memories of disappeared objects are hunted down by the police.

Some, including the narrator's editor, R, hide in secret rooms to evade the cops.

Ogawa, an award-winning author who has written other novels on the theme of memory, told The New York Times that she was taken by The Diary Of Anne Frank and wanted to adapt it for her own work. And she devotes a sizeable section of her book to depicting R's almost airless existence in his hideout.

Adding to the claustrophobia is the story within a story - the novel the narrator is writing is about a typing student who is locked away in a tower by her lover. The student has a chance one day to escape. However, she has lost not only her voice, but also her will to survive.

Likewise, few of the island's residents pipe up to protest when things are made to vanish, including the heaps of books that are tossed into fires. "Men who start by burning books end by burning other men," the narrator tells a friend.

The steady disappearance of everything leads to a well-earned conclusion that is logical yet devastating nonetheless.

Ogawa's book, which was adapted into a play in Japan last year, is a dystopian horror story that, disturbingly, does not seem all that far-fetched.

If you like this, read: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, about an inhumane and totalitarian regime that uses women as reproductive tools. (Vintage Publishing, 2017, $18.95, Books Kinokuniya).