A review of a Yoko Ogawa novel by Kenji Weaver on Fandom Pulse:
The premise of The Memory Police is that things are vanishing from an unnamed island, and most of the islanders forget the things even existed. Ribbons go first. Then perfume, hats, birds, fruit, photographs, novels. When something is “disappeared,” the residents are required to dispose of every physical trace of it, and shortly thereafter the concept itself fades from their minds. They look at a bird and see only a small moving thing they have no word for and no feeling about. A small minority, however, retain their memories. The Memory Police, an authoritarian force whose ranks no one ever quite sees recruited, hunt these people down. The narrator is a novelist on the island. Her editor, R, is one of the people who remembers, so she hides him in a secret room beneath her floor.
The novel was published in Japan in 1994, twenty-five years before it appeared in English. It has been called Orwellian, Kafkaesque, Borgesian, and a half-dozen other useful but slightly misleading shorthands. None of them is quite right. Ogawa is not writing dystopia in any sense Orwell would have recognized; her authoritarian regime is curiously off-camera, more a weather system than a state, and the question of whether anyone runs the disappearances is left unanswered because the question is not the point. The question is what happens to a self when the materials it was built from are slowly removed. The answer, which the book takes its full length to reach and which it reaches by demonstrating rather than arguing, is that the self disappears with them, and that the disappearance can be borne with a strange tenderness, even peace, by the person disappearing.
I haven’t read this one yet, but I like Ogawa so I’ll have to put it on the list once I finish the two Charles Stross novels I’m reading. He stuck the landing on the Laundry series better than one might have expected, and certainly not the way most authors would have.