This book is like The Giver in reverse but doesn't frame itself as a thinkpiece or a fable, and so execution falls very short of what I would expect for a "National Book Award finalist." Who writes this stuff? "A stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language" – pick up like any other book and I think you might have a better time instead of this pat here's what you should think next. Here's what you should think next ass storytelling. Several descriptions of the book say 'mystery', 'thriller,' 'cautionary tale' –I even saw 'horror'– about state surveillance, and it doesn't offer any of the trappings of any of those genres...

The story takes place on an "unnamed island" (later plagued by typhoons, so like,,,). There is exactly one place in the world which places such high emphasis on social conformity that no one would seem to bat an eye at the encroachment of authoritarianism. This story could not happen in Baltimore, or Cork, or St. Petersburg...

There's not enough backstory to motivate really anything in the book at all. The villains are the villains because we said so. They're unidimensionally evil, no nuance or explanation or motive or personality. Maybe they've already disappeared recollection of why they exist and so we're post-veil of un-ignorance, but that's never even nodded to as a possibility; I'm doing the work for the book here by retconning a permissible reason as to why the book sucks.

Some people have a genetic resistance to the forgetting mechanism (also never explained, never explored) and those people get rounded up by the memory police. Society offers no resistance to these mild brown-shirt tactics, and we're also not given any reason to believe that they're incapable of resisting tyranny. There's no description of the rest of the governmental structure, the numbers of the police, or the population which has evidently been utterly subdued into passive compliance / acceptance.

The titular memory police are not even an honest-to-god Gestappo. People talk pretty openly about things being disappeared and how they'll forget about them in short order and how that's kind of a bummer, but no one ever does anything about it... Acknowledgement of the mechanisms of terror would itself be verboten under a real surveillance state, but people are just matter of fact openly discussing the realities of the memory police and the elephant in the room as a known evil with ZERO motivation to do anything about it. The plot can only unfold because of a manufactured helplessness; yawn. The contrived villain-state isn't even as foreboding as any real secret police states which exist in any 20th century history book... So maybe she's not trying to actually be scary, okay? what is she trying to accomplish? suspense? thrill? neither happen since the memory police aren't actually scary. There's no mystery since nothing of consequence that we would care about is ever explained and none of the characters seem to attempt to understand their predicament. Thus the story is classified as "fable" but there's not even any moral or lesson or conflict to provoke food for thought other than "gee, I sure am glad this bullshit is made up." I'm not even trying to pull a Wahlbergian "if i were on that plane, things would've gone down differently" – I'm saying that writing a book where no such character might exist is boring. The memory police never even kill anyone "on-screen," they're rather polite if not a bit bureaucratic, and we have no reason to actually fear them since direct resistance prompting anything like a show of force is never even attempted. The one time they do "raid" her apartment, THEY RING THE FUCKING DOORBELL I mean come on.

The protagonist is an aspiring author who helps hide her editor R who has the genetic resistance. I would expect maybe some tension or conflict to arise during the sequence where she helps smuggle him into the hiding place she constructs with the help of her family friend the ferry builder, but it all pretty much goes off without a hitch. Yay!!

People—and I’m no exception—seem capable of forgetting almost anything, much as if our island were unable to float in anything but an expanse of totally empty sea.

Chapter 12/13: protag attempts to burn the last photos of her mother and her editor tells her not to. I think this opens up a good question about what is more important: memory or the simulacrum thereof.

As I was gathering all the albums and photos in the house—including the portrait of my mother on the mantelpiece—to burn them in the garden incinerator, R made a desperate effort to stop me.

“Photographs are precious. They preserve memories. If you burn them, there’s no getting them back. You mustn’t do this. Absolutely not.”

“But what can I do? The time has come for them to disappear,” I told him.

“If their photographs are gone, how will you remember your parents’ faces?” he asked, looking deeply troubled.

“It’s their photographs that will disappear, not my mother and father,” I said. “I’ll never forget their faces.”

At one point, she voluntarily goes to the MemPol station to ask about her friend who's been taken into custody:

“You have a talent for asking the impossible, young lady.” The man pressed his fingers against his temples. “Most of what we do here must be kept secret. That’s the nature of our work,” he added.

“Then can you at least tell me whether he’s being kept safe somewhere?”

“I can assure you he’s perfectly safe. And haven’t you just told me there’s no need to interrogate him? Or is there something that causes you to worry that he might come to harm?”

IT'S TOTALLY ARBITRARY. SUBDUING THE PEOPLE OF THE ISLAND SEEMS AS EASY AS TAKING CANDY FROM A BABY. They're doing evil shit without any sort of justification offered either by them or even speculated about by the protagonist or any of her confederates, It's just nonsense and I don't really sympathize with them. I might if it was implied that the memory police started by removing any memory of self-agency or executive function, but the progression of things they disappear kind of implies that they're still working on the technology/mechanism of disappearing things.

They start with objects and then move to more abstract concepts like arms and legs. Why not remove anger, or greed, or revolutionary ideation or something. Memory police don't even have weapons!!!

That was the moment I began to regret having come. The more information I provided, the closer they would be to R. I should have realized that beforehand. Still, it was even more dangerous to hesitate. Given their history with my mother, it was more than likely they already knew all the information they were asking me to write down. They weren’t interested in my name and address; they were testing me. So the important thing was to remain calm, to act naturally.

Is she stupid or just dumb? Why is she even going to the secret police to ask about her friend in the first place then??? Zero self preservation instinct. She recognizes that the tea she's just been served has probably been drugged, but then continues to drink all of it. Why the fuck is she even there in the first place? And worse of all why doesn't Ogawa write in any sort of consequence for her stupidity?

“I remember hearing a saying long ago: ‘Men who start by burning books end by burning other men,’ ” I said.

Followed up by the dumbass question from the old man:

“Who said that?” asked the old man, speaking softly and bringing his hand to his chin.

“I’ve forgotten, though I’m sure it was someone important. But I wonder if that’s where we’re headed.”

and then on the next page:

“How did it feel when the ferry was disappeared?” I asked him.

“It’s so long ago I don’t really remember.”

I wonder if this whole book is just going to converge on a point of people not remembering anything. that'll be really riveting to read! Wish they'd apply any amount of critical thinking before they become paraplegic vegetables.

When asked whether or not she loves R by the old man she responds by saying his soul is too dense???

“I suppose,” I said, my tone intentionally ambiguous. “But do you think he’ll ever be able to come out of hiding? Do you think he’ll be able to see his wife and child again? I doubt it. I think he’ll be able to live only in the hidden room. His soul is too dense. If he comes out, he’ll dissolve into pieces, like a deep-sea fish pulled to the surface too quickly. I suppose my job is to go on holding him here at the bottom of the sea.”

And that if he ever leaves the hidden room, he will dissolve and therefore she has to press him down. She's doing to him exactly what the weirdo in her novel is doing to the typist: keeping him prisoner, visiting at her pleasure, and mining him for his souls. It's a weird and controlling dynamic projected onto the realities of his effective imprisonment and she doesn't even seem to make the connection. I don't even know if it's intentional by the author since the dream-sequence story-within-a-story parts are also so poorly written, it seems more like it's just a token example of thing which will be taken from her by the memory police. Yawn.

Earthquake also brings to mind one of the consequential plot holes of like why the memory police aren't eradicating memory of things that are actually harmful instead random shit like birds and harmonicas. What exactly are the memory police trying to accomplish other than just being inconvenient and oppressive?

Lazy explanation for the poor writing could be that the protagonist was too youn to remeber why the memory police came about or that they're actively suppressing memories of their own genesis, but that's never even hinted at, nor does the author seem interested in adding any sort of nuance like that which might make the characters remotely tolerable to read about. I'm having to come up with way too much explanation for the story that's like 3/4 underway without any sort of real tension or threat crossing the page yet...

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