YOKO OGAWA has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Her works include The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas; The Housekeeper and the Professor; Hotel Iris; and Revenge. She lives in Hyogo.
*** 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST ***
One of the Best Books of the Year:
The New York Times ● The Washington Post ● Chicago
Tribune ● The Guardian ● Time ● The Dallas
Morning News ● Financial
Times ● Esquire ● Library Journal ●
The A.V. Club ● Kirkus Reviews ● LitHub
“An elegantly spare dystopian fable . . . Reading The Memory Police
is like sinking into a snowdrift: lulling yet suspenseful, it
tingles with dread and incipient numbness . . . Ogawa’s ruminant
style captures the alienation of being alive as the world’s
ecosystems, ice sheets, languages, animal species and possible
futures vanish more quickly than any one mind can apprehend.” —The
New York Times Book Review
"[A] masterly novel." —The New Yorker
“The Memory Police is a masterpiece: a deep pool that can be
experienced as fable or allegory, warning and illumination. It is a
novel that makes us see differently, opening up its ideas in
inconspicuous ways, knowing that all moments of understanding and
grace are fleeting. It is political and human, it makes no
promises. It is a rare work of patient and courageous vision . . .
[It] reaches English-language readers as if sent from the future.”
—The Guardian
“A masterful work of speculative fiction . . . An unforgettable
literary thriller full of atmospheric horror.” —Chicago Tribune
"Quietly devastating . . . Ogawa finds new ways to express old
anxieties about authoritarianism, environmental depredation and
humanity’s willingness to be complicit in its own demise." —The
Washington Post
“A feat of dark imagination . . . Ogawa stages an intimate,
suspenseful drama of courage and endurance while conjuring up a
world that is at once recognizable and profoundly strange . . .
Emerging from Ms. Ogawa’s latest creation feels like waking up to
find an unsettling dream sliding just out of memory.” —The Wall
Street Journal
“The Memory Police truly feels like a portrait of today. To await
the future is to disappear the present—which only accelerates the
speed with which now turns to then, and then turns to nothing . . .
It's difficult not to see The Memory Police as a comment on
creeping authoritarianism. So too is it a lovely, if bleak,
meditation on faith and creativity—or faith in creativity—in a
world that disavows both.” —Wired (Book of the Month)
“In an era where the concept of truth is negotiable and Alexa might
be spying on you, Ogawa’s taut novel of surveillance makes for
timely, provocative reading . . . A harrowing parable about the
importance of memory and the profound danger of cultural
amnesia.” —Esquire
“One of Japan’s most acclaimed authors explores truth, state
surveillance and individual autonomy. Ogawa’s fable echoes the
themes of George Orwell’s 1984, Ray
Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Gabriel Garcia
Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, but it has a voice and
power all its own.” —Time
“The novel is particularly resonant now, at a time of rising
authoritarianism across the globe. Throughout the book, citizens
live under police surveillance. Novels are burned. People are
detained and interrogated without explanation.” —The New York
Times
“A deeply traumatizing novel in the best way
possible.” —Vulture
“Ogawa lays open a hushed defiance against a totalitarian regime by
training her prodigious talent on magnifying the efforts of those
who persistently but quietly rebel.” —The Japan Times
"You won’t be forgetting this haunting and imaginative novel
anytime soon.” —Refinery29
“A searing, vividly imagined novel by a wildly talented writer . .
. Dark and ambitious.” —Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed
review)
"A poignant examination about how struggles and people are
interconnected and the fact that security is not enough to hope for
. . . Ogawa’s prose feel[s] applicable not just to political
atrocities like genocide but to climate change or any other crisis
made worse by general complacency.” —The A. V. Club
“A taut, claustrophobic thriller.” —Salon
“Ogawa crafts a powerful story about the processing of loss and the
importance of memories.” —Annabel Gutterman, Time
“Ogawa’s anointed translator, Snyder, adroitly captures the quiet
control with which Ogawa gently unfurls her ominously surreal and
Orwellian narrative.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Eerily surreal, Ogawa's novel takes Orwellian tropes of a
surveillance state and makes them markedly her own.” —Thrillist
“Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and
often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of
those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities.” —Kirkus
Reviews (starred review)
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