“I am just trying to depict each individual character and how those characters are living in their current time.” Yet Ogawa did not intend to write a political allegory, she said. In Japan, where history itself has been subject to revision - and those who bring up the country’s wartime past can be denounced or even censored - the novel’s lament for erased memories could be read as veiled criticism. “Regardless of what had happened, it was almost certainly an unfortunate event,” the narrator explains, “and, moreover, simply talking about it could put you in danger.” Neighbors are taken away in the middle of the night.Īll the while, the citizens, cowed by fear, do nothing to stop the disappearances. People are detained and interrogated without explanation.

Throughout the book, citizens live under police surveillance. “I wanted to digest Anne’s experience in my own way and then recompose it into my work,” said Ogawa during an interview in her home, located in a suburb between Kobe and Osaka.Īlthough “The Memory Police” was first released in Japan in 1994, the novel is particularly resonant now, at a time of rising authoritarianism across the globe.

The narrator, a novelist, shelters her editor - who remembers everything - in a room reminiscent of the Dutch annex where Anne hid with her family. Those who retain their recall are outlaws who go into hiding.

It takes place on a mysterious island where an authoritarian government makes whole categories of objects or animals disappear overnight, wiping them from the memories of citizens. And writing could give people freedom.”ĭecades later, Ogawa transmuted her imagining of Anne’s world into “The Memory Police,” a dystopian novel that is Ogawa’s fifth book to be translated into English and which goes on sale in the United States this week. “Her diary proved that people can grow even in such a confined situation. “Anne’s heart and mind were so rich,” said Ogawa, now 57 and the author of more than 40 novels and story collections. To conjure the kind of physical captivity that Anne experienced, Ogawa would crawl, notebook in hand, into a drawer or under a table draped with a quilt. ASHIYA, Japan - When Yoko Ogawa discovered “The Diary of Anne Frank” as a lonely teenager in Japan, she was so taken by it that she began to keep a diary of her own, writing to Anne as if she were a cherished friend.

Yoko ogawa's the memory police