Books Like The Memory Police

What to expect from The Memory Fare

Set against Ogawa specifically:

Same as Ogawa

Memory removed by a system that states its terms and is never argued with. A loss you do not feel at the moment it happens. A record kept against it: Cora’s ledger, a map with names in the front, a visitor book signed for six years. Quiet throughout; no on-page violence.

Different

The loss is chosen, itemised and paid, one memory per door, by the person who will lose the most. There is no state, no police and no island: a train, a conductor who answers only what he is asked, and a rule. The book is about a mother and a daughter, not a population.

Tone

Quiet and devastating. The one readers describe as unbearable in the best way; Ogawa readers tend to say it is the same temperature and a shorter fall.

Content notes

A missing child, six years of parental grief, prolonged searching. A daughter who has been paying too. No on-page violence.

Reading order

Book Two of three, written as a standalone; about 24,000 words, a long evening. The premise is explained in the first chapter and nothing from Book One is needed.

Formats

Kindle and paperback. Free to borrow with Kindle Unlimited, which The Memory Police is not.

Start here: which part of The Memory Police are you missing?

The novel is 288 pages in Stephen Snyder’s translation and it does three things at once. The reviews split three ways on which one matters; so do readers.

1. I wanted 1984 with the volume turned down: the police, the raids, the hidden room, everyone complying and nobody explaining.

   The trick is that Ogawa never tells you who runs the island or why, and the books that match her are the ones that keep that silence. Never Let Me Go is the closest thing in English: a narrator raised inside an arrangement she was “told and not told” about, who never once raises her voice. The Palace of Dreams is a state that files what its subjects dream, as Ogawa’s files what they remember. Nineteen Eighty-Four is the ancestor, and louder than you remember. And the hidden room has a source, which Ogawa has named: Anne Frank’s annex.

   Never Let Me Go · The Palace of Dreams · Nineteen Eighty-Four · The Diary of a Young Girl

2. I wanted more of that voice: calm, exact, domestic, and wrong in a way I could not point to.

   This is the Japanese strand, and it is not Murakami. The New York Times compared Ogawa to Beckett and to Kobo Abe, and Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes is the book to read: a man lowered into a sand pit, told to shovel, who slowly stops wanting the ladder. Ogawa’s own The Housekeeper and the Professor is the same restraint in a warm key. Convenience Store Woman has no speculative premise at all and the closest deadpan.

   The Woman in the Dunes · The Housekeeper and the Professor · Convenience Store Woman

3. I cannot shake the subtraction: the birds, then the calendars, then spring, then a leg. I want to watch a world be removed.

   You want erasure as weather rather than as policy. The Buried Giant is a whole country forgetting under a dragon’s breath, and the only other novel that asks whether the forgetting might be a mercy. Blindness takes one sense from an unnamed city and follows the people who are left. The Wall removes everyone else overnight and leaves a woman with a cow and a notebook. Severance is the American office version, funnier and no less bleak.

   The Buried Giant · Blindness · The Wall · Severance

4. I want to understand what the manuscript under the floor was for. The novel-within-the-novel is the part I keep thinking about.

   Then read the prose section below before you pick anything, because it is the reason half the usual recommendations misfire. The short version: The Memory Police is a book about an artist trying to finish something while the world she is describing is removed. The read-alikes that work are the ones with a record kept against subtraction — a diary, a report, a journal — not the ones with a regime.

   The Diary of a Young Girl · The Wall · Never Let Me Go

What The Memory Police actually is, and why the lists miss it

Every ranking page for this query is built from one of two keywords. The first is Japanese: Goodreads’s “readers also enjoyed” list is half Kawaguchi, Yoshimoto, Kawakami and Murakami, none of whom write anything like Ogawa. The second is dystopia: the aggregator lists reach for Atwood, Stephenson and Bradbury, who explain their worlds, and Ogawa explains nothing. Nobody says who runs the island. Nobody says why things disappear. There is no uprising, no leader, no revelation, and the police, when they raid the narrator’s house, are polite.

Take the book apart and you get three things. The state: a police force that removes objects on the morning they are forgotten and arrests the few who remember, and an island that complies so completely that grief is the only form resistance takes. The register: Stephen Snyder’s translation of a prose Madeleine Thien called “weightless and unadorned”, in which a woman describes the loss of her own left leg in the tone she used for ribbons. The subtraction: the sequence itself, hats and perfume, then birds, then roses, photographs, calendars, novels, spring, and finally the body, each one grieved for a day and then not at all.

Underneath all three is the thing the lists never name. The narrator is a novelist. The book she is writing, about a typist who loses her voice and is kept in a clock tower by her teacher, runs through The Memory Police in italics, and it is the only object on the island that keeps growing while everything else shrinks. Dylan Brown, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, argued that the novel’s real subject is not the regime but the artist, and that its nearest relative is not Orwell but The Diary of a Young Girl. Ogawa herself has said as much. So every book below is tiered by how much of the three it replicates, and tagged with which part; and the ones that work best all have someone keeping a record.

Closest: the three that do what Ogawa does

Not the same premise. The same mechanism: a narrator inside an arrangement nobody explains, describing it calmly, while the reader supplies the horror.

1. 01

   Never Let Me Go Kazuo Ishiguro

   2005 · 288 pages · Kathy H., 31, first person, looking back

   Closest match The state

   Kathy H. was raised at Hailsham, a boarding school in an alternative 1990s England, and she tells you about it in the voice of someone who has decided to be reasonable. The reader works out what the students are for long before she says it. When Miss Lucy, the one teacher who breaks ranks, tells them they have been “told and not told”, she is describing Ogawa’s island exactly: a population that knows the terms of its own erasure and has agreed, without ever being asked, not to mind.

   What it shares with The Memory Police is the compliance and the absence of a villain. Nobody at Hailsham is cruel; nobody on the island is either, quite. What it lacks is the strangeness: there is no hidden room, nothing disappears, and the loss is of a future rather than a past. If you loved Ogawa for the surreal sequence of vanishings, start with The Buried Giant instead. If you loved her for the moment you realised the narrator was never going to fight, this is the book, and it will hurt more.

   “The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told.” Miss Lucy, ch. 7

   How it ends

   It ends in a field in Norfolk with no rescue and no anger, and the absence of both is what stays.

   Contains

   The premise (young people raised as organ donors) is bleak throughout, though nothing is shown graphically

   Skip if

   Skip it if you need the surreal: nothing impossible happens here except the arrangement.

   Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, structure, reception, LitCharts: the Miss Lucy speech, ch. 7

2. 02

   The Buried Giant Kazuo Ishiguro

   2015 · 345 pages · Axl and Beatrice, close third, with interludes from Gawain and a boatman

   Closest match The subtraction

   Post-Arthurian Britain, and a mist lies over the whole country. Nobody can hold on to last week. An elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, set out to find a son they can no longer quite picture, and pick up a Saxon warrior, a bitten boy and an ancient Sir Gawain on the way. The mist turns out to be the breath of a she-dragon called Querig, and it was put there on purpose, after a massacre, so that Britons and Saxons could live side by side without remembering what one did to the other. Kill the dragon and the memories come back. So does the war.

   This is the only novel I know that takes Ogawa’s premise and turns it round: what if the forgetting were the merciful option? Ishiguro is warmer than Ogawa and slower, and Ursula Le Guin famously objected to his nervousness about the word fantasy (he replied that he stood “on the side of the pixies and the dragons”). Alex Preston in the Guardian called it “a beautiful, heartbreaking book about the duty to remember and the urge to forget”. That is the argument The Memory Police never has out loud. Here it is the whole plot.

   How it ends

   The dragon dies, the memories return, and a boatman takes Beatrice across to an island first; whether Axl follows is left on the shore with him.

   Contains

   A massacre of Saxon villages, recalled rather than shown; A child’s death by plague, recalled; Ogres, briefly

   Skip if

   Skip it if you want Ogawa’s speed; this ambles, on purpose, and the first hundred pages are the slowest.

   Checked against: Wikipedia: plot, the Le Guin exchange, reception, Kirkus review

3. 03

   The Woman in the Dunes Kōbō Abe

   1962 · 240 pages · tr. E. Dale Saunders · Niki Jumpei, close third

   Closest match The register

   A Tokyo schoolteacher who collects insects misses the last bus from a coastal village and is offered a bed for the night in a house at the bottom of a sand pit, reached by rope ladder. In the morning the ladder is gone. The widow who lives there shovels sand every night so the house is not buried, and the village hauls it up in buckets, and now he shovels too. He tries to escape and the quicksand takes him back. He invents a device that draws water from the sand and, for the first time, has something of his own. When the ladder is finally left down he does not climb it.

   The New York Times compared Ogawa to Abe, and this is why: the same flat, exact, physical prose, the same refusal to explain the arrangement, the same slow conversion of captivity into a life. The sand does to Niki what the disappearances do to the island: it removes his past a grain at a time until there is nothing to go back for. Sixty years old and it reads like it was translated last week.

   How it ends

   Seven years on, a court notice declares him missing; he has stopped being a man who would leave.

   Contains

   A coerced sexual relationship, presented without comment; A scene in which the villagers demand sex as the price of an hour outside; it ends in an assault she fights off

   Skip if

   Skip it if you need the loss to be grieved; Niki adapts, and the book thinks that is the horror.

   Checked against: Wikipedia: plot, Yomiuri Prize, the 1964 film, Japan Society review (George Mullins)

Strong: the ancestor, the source, and the near-misses worth your time

One of these Ogawa has named as the reason she writes. One is the book every review mentions. Three share a large part of what she built.

4. 04

   Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell

   1949 · 328 pages · Winston Smith, 39, close third

   Strong match The state

   Everyone says it, so it is worth being precise about why. The part of Orwell that matches Ogawa is not Big Brother, the telescreens or Room 101; it is Winston’s day job. He works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, rewriting old copies of The Times so that the past agrees with the present, and dropping the originals down a duct called the memory hole to be burned. People who have been vaporised become unpersons: not dead, but never born. That is the administrative machinery of The Memory Police, forty-five years early.

   The difference is volume. Orwell explains everything, at length, in a book-within-the-book and then in a torture chamber; Ogawa explains nothing and her police say almost nothing. Winston fights and is broken. Ogawa’s narrator hides one man and keeps writing. If you read The Memory Police and wanted to know what the island’s regime was for, this is the book that will tell you; be warned that being told is a different pleasure from the one you came from.

   How it ends

   Winston betrays Julia in Room 101 and, in the last line, loves Big Brother.

   Contains

   Torture, described at length; Rats

   Skip if

   Skip it if what you loved in Ogawa was the silence; there is none here.

   Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, plot, reception, Wikipedia: the memory hole

5. 05

   The Housekeeper and the Professor Yoko Ogawa

   2003 · 192 pages · tr. Stephen Snyder · the housekeeper, first person

   Strong match The register

   Same author, same translator, opposite temperature. A housekeeper is sent to a mathematician whose memory has lasted eighty minutes since a car crash in 1975. He manages by pinning notes to his suit; the one on his cuff reads My memory lasts only eighty minutes. Every morning she introduces herself again. He asks her shoe size, finds a prime in it, and is delighted. Her ten-year-old son, whom the Professor names Root for the flat top of his head, comes after school, and the three of them build something out of prime numbers and baseball that has to be rebuilt daily.

   Ogawa told Nippon.com that the Professor’s limited memory “brought into relief his humanity”, and that is the reversal: in The Memory Police forgetting hollows people out; here it strips one man down to his kindness. The notes on his jacket are the manuscript under the floor, a record kept against subtraction. Kirkus called it a fable that “deftly balances whimsy with heartache”, which is right, and it is the book to hand anyone who found the island unbearable and wants to know what else this writer can do.

   How it ends

   The Professor’s window shrinks to nothing and he goes into care; the visits continue, and Root grows up to teach mathematics.

   Contains

   Progressive memory loss in an elderly man, handled gently

   Skip if

   Skip it if you want dread; there is none, and the maths is real.

   Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, plot, the Booksellers’ Award, Kirkus review, Nippon.com interview with Ogawa (March 2020)

6. 06

   Blindness José Saramago

   1995 · 288 pages · tr. Giovanni Pontiero · omniscient, no names, no quotation marks

   Strong match The subtraction

   A man waiting at a traffic light goes blind: not dark, but white, as if he had driven into milk. It spreads. The government quarantines the first cases in an empty asylum, and the asylum fills, and a gang with a gun takes control of the food. Nobody in the book has a name. They are the doctor, the doctor’s wife, the girl with the dark glasses, the boy with the squint, the first blind man. The doctor’s wife can still see, and pretends she cannot so that she can stay with her husband. She is the only person left keeping a record of what things look like.

   The match with Ogawa is the unnamed city, the subtraction of one faculty from everyone at once, and the single character who holds what the rest have lost. The mismatch is everything else. Saramago is loud where Ogawa is hushed, physical where she is abstract, and the asylum chapters are among the most brutal in modern fiction. Kirkus called it “another masterpiece” and heard Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Plague in it. It is the subtraction branch at full volume, and the one book on this page to read with the light on.

   How it ends

   The sight returns as suddenly as it went, in the order it was lost, and the doctor’s wife looks up at the sky and is afraid.

   Contains

   Rape of a ward of women in exchange for food, on the page; Squalor, starvation, a killing with scissors; A dog eating the dead

   Skip if

   Skip it if Ogawa’s restraint was the point; this has none, and the punctuation is a wall you have to climb.

   Checked against: Wikipedia: plot, style, the Nobel citation, the film, Kirkus review

7. 07

   The Palace of Dreams Ismail Kadare

   1981 · 208 pages · tr. Barbara Bray, from the French of Jusuf Vrioni · Mark-Alem, close third

   Strong match The state

   Nobody else lists this and it is the best match for the police themselves. Mark-Alem, a nervous young man from a great Ottoman family, takes a post at the Tabir Sarrail, the Palace of Dreams: a ministry that collects every dream dreamed in the empire, sorts them, interprets them, and once a week selects a Master-Dream to be carried to the Sultan as the state’s guidance. He is moved from Selection to Interpretation. The corridors are endless. The files go back centuries. And one day a dream crosses his desk that implicates his own family.

   Ogawa’s police file what people remember; Kadare’s file what they dream. Both states reach into the one place that ought to be private and administer it, and both novels are told from inside the machinery by someone who never quite understands it. Kadare wrote it under Hoxha and it was banned in Albania in 1982 after twenty thousand copies had sold, which tells you it landed. Kirkus: “a memorable portrait of a man powerless before the caprices of Fate and its handmaiden, the State.” Short, cold, and the most under-read book on this page.

   How it ends

   An uncle is executed on the strength of a dream, another rises, and Mark-Alem ends up running the Palace.

   Contains

   A political execution, off-page; Torture of dreamers, reported

   Skip if

   Skip it if you want a character to root for; Mark-Alem is furniture, and that is the point.

   Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, the 1982 banning, plot, Kirkus review

8. 08

   The Diary of a Young Girl Anne Frank

   1947 · 368 pages · tr. Susan Massotty (Definitive Edition) · Anne, 13 to 15, diary entries addressed to Kitty

   Strong match The source

   Ogawa has said in plain terms where The Memory Police comes from. “For me, reading The Diary of a Young Girl was the reason I became an author,” she told Nippon.com in 2020. She read it at fourteen, started a diary of her own, and later wrote two books about Frank. The hidden room under the narrator’s floor is the annex behind the bookcase on the Prinsengracht, and she built in a private signal: “On the day the editor moves to the secret room, it’s raining heavily. This was the same for Anne Frank and her family.”

   Read it, or reread it, for the thing the novel borrows most: a writer keeping a record inside a shrinking space while the people outside are being removed. Anne’s entries run from June 1942 to 1 August 1944; the arrest was three days later. Two of the office staff, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, gathered the pages from the floor before the rooms were emptied. That is the ending The Memory Police hopes for on R’s behalf, and knows it cannot promise.

   How it ends

   The last entry is 1 August 1944; the afterword tells you the rest, and it is the reason the book exists.

   Contains

   The Holocaust; the afterword gives the deaths plainly

   Skip if

   Skip it only if you read it at school and think you remember it; the Definitive Edition is a third longer and a different book.

   Checked against: Nippon.com: Ogawa on Anne Frank and the secret room (March 2020), Wikipedia: dates, editions, the rescue of the pages

Where it came from: what Ogawa has said

Read-alike pages usually guess at influence. Ogawa has been specific enough that there is no need.

Anne Frank. In the Nippon.com interview above, and in the Asymptote essay on the novel, Ogawa says she read the diary at fourteen and “realized that writing was a way for human beings to free themselves”. She published a book of essays on Frank in 1995, the year after The Memory Police came out in Japan, and a book for young readers in 2011. The sealed room, the helpers who bring food, the rain on the day of moving in: all of it is the annex.

Kobo Abe and Beckett. The New York Times named both when it reviewed the translation, and Abe is the useful one. The Woman in the Dunes and Abe’s The Box Man are where the Japanese tradition of calm, physical, unexplained captivity lives, and Ogawa is its inheritor in a way that Murakami, with his jazz and his talking cats, is not.

What she has not named. Orwell and Bradbury, whom every review cites. Ogawa wrote the book in 1994, in Japanese, and the English-language reflex to hear 1984 in it says more about the reviewers than the author. Madeleine Thien, reviewing it for the Guardian, made the point that the novel “doesn’t lend itself to easy analysis; we cannot say the state is Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Nazi Germany”. The island is not a code for anywhere. That is what makes it frightening, and it is what the dystopia lists cannot see.

Loose: three that match one part and not the others

9. 09

   The Wall Marlen Haushofer

   1963 · 248 pages · tr. Shaun Whiteside · an unnamed woman, about forty, first person, in the form of a written report

   Looser match The subtraction

   A woman goes to a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains with her cousin and her cousin’s husband. They walk to the village; she stays behind. In the morning they have not come back, and on the road there is an invisible wall, and beyond it a man at a pump who is not moving and will never move. Everything on the far side is dead. She has a dog called Lynx, and soon a cow, and a cat, and a pencil, and the book is the report she writes over the following two years for nobody.

   What it shares with Ogawa is the woman alone, the world taken away, and the record kept anyway; James Wood called it “a dystopian novel that gradually becomes a utopian one”, and Doris Lessing wrote that only a woman could have written its attention to “the details of making and keeping life”. What it lacks is the state, and the incremental dread: here the loss is total on the first page and the rest is hay, milk and weather. If the birds disappearing was what got you, this is the calmer, stranger version, and there is one act of violence near the end that will take the top of your head off.

   How it ends

   A man appears, kills the dog and the calf, and she shoots him; the report ends with the matches running low.

   Contains

   Animal deaths, two of them sudden and central; A killing

   Skip if

   Skip it if you need other people on the page; for two hundred pages there are none.

   Checked against: New Directions edition: the Wood, Lessing and Choi blurbs, Wikipedia: plot, reception, the 2012 film

10. 10

    Severance Ling Ma

    2018 · 304 pages · Candace Chen, first person, in two timelines

    Looser match The subtraction

    Candace Chen coordinates Bible production for a Manhattan publisher, which means phoning printers in Shenzhen about paper stock. Shen Fever arrives from Shenzhen. The fevered do not die at once; they repeat their old routines, setting the table, folding the same shirt, until they starve. Candace keeps going in to the office because she has a contract and nobody has told her to stop. When the city is empty she photographs it for a blog called NY Ghost. Then a small group led by a man called Bob picks her up and drives her toward a shopping mall in Illinois he calls the Facility.

    The link to Ogawa is compliance as a form of forgetting: the fevered are the islanders, doing the thing they always did after the meaning has gone, and Candace is the narrator who notices and keeps doing it anyway. Ma is funny, and American, and interested in offices, none of which Ogawa is. It won the Kirkus Prize; the reviewers there called it “smart, funny, humane”. For the subtraction reader it is the loose fit that most repays the risk.

    How it ends

    Bob catches the fever and starts his loop; Candace takes the car and drives toward Chicago, pregnant, alone, and the book stops.

    Contains

    Pandemic and mass death, mostly off-page; Imprisonment during pregnancy; A parent’s death, recalled

    Skip if

    Skip it if satire breaks the spell for you; the office chapters are a comedy, and meant to be.

    Checked against: Kirkus review and prize, Wikipedia: plot, Shen Fever, reception

11. 11

    Convenience Store Woman Sayaka Murata

    2016 · 160 pages · tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori · Keiko Furukura, 36, first person

    Looser match The register

    No speculative premise at all. Keiko has worked at the same Smile Mart for eighteen years and it is the only place she has ever understood the rules. She learned to speak by copying colleagues; she learned to dress by copying them too. When a lazy, resentful man called Shiraha is sacked, she takes him home to live in her bath so that both of them can look normal to their families. Then she quits, and the sound of a convenience store from the street is the first thing in the book that makes her feel anything.

    It is here because the register is the closest on the page: flat, exact, faintly appalled at nothing, Julie Myerson’s “sublimely weird”. Keiko has erased herself into a role as completely as the islanders have been erased into theirs, and does not mind. It is also short, funny and quick, which the others are not. Read it in an evening between two of the heavy ones.

    How it ends

    She abandons the job interview, walks into a new store, and hears it call her; that is the last page and it is presented as a happy one.

    Contains

    A man who is casually contemptuous of women, on most of his pages

    Skip if

    Skip it if you want anything to vanish; nothing does, and the dread is entirely social.

    Checked against: Kirkus review, Wikipedia: the Akutagawa Prize, the reviews

At a glance: each book against The Memory Police

Four questions that decide whether a book will work for you after Ogawa. “Volume” is the prose, not the plot.

Page counts are for the editions in the fact sheets (mostly first UK or US hardbacks); paperbacks vary.

Counterweight: the one you will be told to read

12. 12

    The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Haruki Murakami

    1994 · 607 pages · tr. Jay Rubin · Toru Okada, first person, with letters, transcripts and a war memoir

    The counterweight The register, inverted

    Toru Okada has quit his job at a law firm and is boiling spaghetti when the phone rings and a woman he does not know starts talking about sex. His cat is missing. His wife Kumiko asks him to find it. Then Kumiko is missing. What follows is a psychic sister act, a teenage neighbour who works for a wig company, an abandoned house with a dry well Toru climbs into to think, and a long, terrible story from a Lieutenant Mamiya about what he saw in Manchuria in 1938. Jay Rubin cut about twenty-five thousand words for the English edition at the publisher’s request; it is still six hundred pages.

    It is here because it is the first thing Goodreads shows an Ogawa reader, and because it demonstrates by contrast what she does. Murakami gives you strangeness in bulk; Ogawa gives you one strangeness and holds it perfectly still. Kirkus called this “a major work”, and it is. It is also the wrong prescription for someone who has just finished a 288-page novel in which the loudest event is a knock on the door.

    How it ends

    Kumiko kills her brother and accepts prison; Toru, back above ground, waits for her, and the book closes on him listening for the bird.

    Contains

    A man skinned alive, described in detail, in the Manchurian chapters; Explicit sex, some of it dreamed; Violence against animals at a zoo

    Skip if

    Skip it if The Memory Police’s restraint was what you loved; this has the opposite virtue.

    Checked against: Kirkus review, Wikipedia: the three volumes, the cuts, the Yomiuri Prize

Where this page’s facts come from

• Nippon.com: Writer Ogawa Yōko’s stories of memory and loss (Itakura Kimie, March 2020) — Ogawa in her own words on Anne Frank, the rain on the day R moves in, and the Professor’s memory.
• LARB: The Curse of Memory (Dylan Brown, 2019) — The argument that the novel is about the artist, not the regime, and closer to Anne Frank than to Orwell.
• Asymptote: A Paltry Little Scrap of the Past (Jacqueline Leung, October 2019) — The bird passage quoted above is verified against this essay; also the typist’s last lines and Ogawa on reading the diary at fourteen.
• Book Marks: all 24 reviews of The Memory Police — The Thien, Lucas, Michaud, Moreno-Garcia and Kirkus lines, with links to each original.
• Wikipedia: The Memory Police — Japanese title and date, the Snyder translation, the three shortlists, the plot.
• Goodreads: quotes from The Memory Police — R’s line about memories not being pulled up by the root, referred to in the FAQ.
• The Hollywood Reporter: Lily Gladstone to star in The Memory Police (January 2024) — The film’s cast, director, writer and producers.
• Deadline: Gladstone on The Memory Police (February 2024) — Gladstone’s account of what the film is about; the most recent substantive statement I could verify.