I've always enjoyed reading Ogawa, and it is a pity that not more of her work is translated into English. The Memory Police is her longest yet in translation. I had high hopes, and they were not quite met. The prose, for sure, is beautiful, haunting and elegiac. I read the work much more as a meditation on loss, the transience of things, people and time; and saw The Memory Police much less as a political allegory or prophetic warning. My biggest issue with the novel was the tenuousness of the premise: how and why do things keep disappearing? When the losses expanded to body parts, my credulity was strained. Further, we learn little about the Memory Police and their motivations. I was also inclined to view the work from a somewhat Darwinian perspective. No surprise that the narrator “disappeared” at the novel's close, while her friend/lover (“R”) endured. He was able to hang on to his memories; she could not (despite my hopes that she might). Thought-provoking nonetheless, and with a clear debt to Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 — 7.5/10.
By Yoko Ogawa