While she defies the Memory Police by hiding a friend in a secret room of her house, she can’t keep her memories.

She’s afflicted by the same forgetting that plagues almost everyone. So many dystopian novels have a protagonist that is uniquely poised to fight the system, but this narrator is quite ordinary. In addition to hunting forgotten items, the Memory Police arrest those who can remember. In the case of the perfume, everyone gathered and poured the bottles into the river, but her mother kept one because she has all of her memories. The Memory Police enforce this destruction.

While forgotten items immediately lose their meaning to the island’s inhabitants, they must still be physically destroyed. In the opening chapters, the narrator’s mother shows her a variety of forgotten objects-some ribbon, a bottle of perfume, an emerald-and she can hardly comprehend them. I wanted more information about the mechanics of this world and to understand how the Memory Police were created, etc., but I stopped looking for answers as the story became more and more abstract. The first half of the book feels like a strange mash-up of 1984 and The Giver set in 1942 Germany. The unnamed narrator lives on an island where things are forgotten one at a time.

Like the winning book, The Discomfort of Evening, it centers around grief and loss, but in a much less tangible way. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa is another book that I’m surprised didn’t win the 2020 International Booker Prize.

The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa