{"product_id":"the-memory-police-isbn-9781101911815","title":"The Memory Police","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eFinalist for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eA haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of \u003ci\u003eThe Housekeeper and the Professor\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . . Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few able to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young writer discovers that her editor is in danger, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards, and together they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. Powerful and provocative,\u003ci\u003e The Memory Police\u003c\/i\u003e is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eTHE NEW YORK TIMES\u003c\/i\u003e * \u003ci\u003eTHE WASHINGTON POST\u003c\/i\u003e * \u003ci\u003eTIME\u003c\/i\u003e * \u003ci\u003eCHICAGO TRIBUNE \u003c\/i\u003e* T\u003ci\u003eHE GUARDIAN\u003c\/i\u003e * \u003ci\u003eESQUIRE\u003c\/i\u003e * \u003ci\u003eTHE DALLAS MORNING NEWS\u003c\/i\u003e * \u003ci\u003eFINANCIAL TIMES\u003c\/i\u003e * \u003ci\u003eLIBRARY JOURNAL\u003c\/i\u003e * THE A.V. CLUB * \u003ci\u003eKIRKUS REVIEWS\u003c\/i\u003e * \u003ci\u003eLITERARY HUB\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAmerican Book Award winner\u003c\/b\u003e“Unforgettable. . . . A masterful work of speculative fiction.” —Chicago Tribune\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Ogawa’s fable echoes the themes of George Orwell’s \u003ci\u003e1984\u003c\/i\u003e, Ray Bradbury’s \u003ci\u003eFahrenheit 451\u003c\/i\u003e, and Gabriel García Márquez’s \u003ci\u003eOne Hundred Years of Solitude\u003c\/i\u003e, but it has a voice and power all its own.” —\u003ci\u003eTime\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A masterpiece. . . . A novel that makes us see differently. . . . It is a rare work of patient and courageous vision.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A feat of dark imagination . . . an intimate, suspenseful drama of courage and endurance.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] masterly novel.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “An elegantly spare dystopian fable. . . . It tingles with dread.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Quietly devastating . . . Ogawa finds new ways to express old anxieties about authoritarianism, environmental depredation and humanity’s willingness to be complicit in its own demise.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Timely, provocative reading . . . A harrowing parable about the importance of memory and the profound danger of cultural amnesia.” —\u003ci\u003eEsquire\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“One of my favorite novels of the decade. . . . It’s a perfect correction to the overwrought politico-apocalyptic fiction so fashionable in These Times. . . . It clarifies all the things our wired society muddles, especially, and most profoundly, the saving grace of the human touch.” —Hillary Kelly, \u003ci\u003eVulture\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Profoundly powerful. . . . It has the timelessness of a fable, yet feels like an urgent warning about the need for resistance in a world that seems all too quick to forget the lessons of the past.” —\u003ci\u003eThe A.V. Club\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A searing, vividly imagined novel by a wildly talented writer . . . Dark and ambitious.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“The novel is particularly resonant now, at a time of rising authoritarianism across the globe. Throughout the book, citizens live under police surveillance. Novels are burned. People are detained and interrogated without explanation.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Ogawa lays open a hushed defiance against a totalitarian regime by training her prodigious talent on magnifying the efforts of those who persistently but quietly rebel.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Japan Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Strange, beautiful and affecting.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Times \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Memory Police\u003c\/i\u003e truly feels like a portrait of today. To await the future is to disappear the present—which only accelerates the speed with which now turns to then, and then turns to nothing . . . A lovely, if bleak, meditation on faith and creativity—or faith in creativity—in a world that disavows both.” —\u003ci\u003eWired \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Haunting and imaginative.” —\u003ci\u003eRefinery29\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Ogawa crafts a powerful story about the processing of loss and the importance of memories.” —Annabel Gutterman, \u003ci\u003eTime\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Eerily surreal, Ogawa’s novel takes Orwellian tropes of a surveillance state and makes them markedly her own.” —\u003ci\u003eThrillist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A taut, claustrophobic thriller.” —\u003ci\u003eSalon\u003c\/i\u003eYoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eA Public Space\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eZoetrope: All-Story\u003c\/i\u003e. Her works include \u003ci\u003eThe Diving Pool\u003c\/i\u003e, a collection of three novellas; \u003ci\u003eThe Housekeeper and the Professor\u003c\/i\u003e; \u003ci\u003eHotel Iris\u003c\/i\u003e; and \u003ci\u003eRevenge\u003c\/i\u003e. She lives in Hyogo.\u003cp\u003e1\u003cbr\u003e I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first—­among all the things that have vanished from the island.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here,” my mother used to tell me when I was still a child. “Transparent things, fragrant things . . . fluttery ones, bright ones . . . wonderful things you can’t possibly imagine.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island. Things go on disappearing, one by one. It won’t be long now,” she added. “You’ll see for yourself. Something will disappear from your life.”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Is it scary?” I asked her, suddenly anxious.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “No, don’t worry. It doesn’t hurt, and you won’t even be particularly sad. One morning you’ll simply wake up and it will be over, before you’ve even realized. Lying still, eyes closed, ears pricked, trying to sense the flow of the morning air, you’ll feel that something has changed from the night before, and you’ll know that you’ve lost something, that something has been disappeared from the island.”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e My mother would talk like this only when we were in her studio in the basement. It was a large, dusty, rough-­floored room, built so close to the river on the north side that you could clearly hear the sound of the current. I would sit on the little stool that was reserved for my use, as my mother, a sculptor, sharpened a chisel or polished a stone with her file and talked on in her quiet voice.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “The island is stirred up after a disappearance. People gather in little groups out in the street to talk about their memories of the thing that’s been lost. There are regrets and a certain sadness, and we try to comfort one another. If it’s a physical object that has been disappeared, we gather the remnants up to burn, or bury, or toss into the river. But no one makes much of a fuss, and it’s over in a few days. Soon enough, things are back to normal, as though nothing has happened, and no one can even recall what it was that disappeared.”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Then she would interrupt her work to lead me back behind the staircase to an old cabinet with rows of small drawers.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Go ahead, open any one you like.”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e I would think about my choice for a moment, studying the rusted oval handles.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e I always hesitated, because I knew what sorts of strange and fascinating things were inside. Here in this secret place, my mother kept hidden many of the things that had been disappeared from the island in the past.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e When at last I made my choice and opened a drawer, she would smile and place the contents on my outstretched palm.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “This is a kind of fabric called ‘ribbon’ that was disappeared when I was just seven years old. You used it to tie up your hair or decorate a skirt.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “And this was called a ‘bell.’ Give it a shake—­it makes a lovely sound.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Oh, you’ve chosen a good drawer today. That’s called an ‘emerald,’ and it’s the most precious thing I have here. It’s a keepsake from my grandmother. They’re beautiful and terribly valuable, and at one point they were the most highly prized jewels on the island. But their beauty has been forgotten now.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “This one is thin and small, but it’s important. When you had something you wanted to tell someone, you would write it down on a piece of paper and paste this ‘stamp’ on it. Then they would deliver it for you, anywhere at all. But that was a long time ago . . .”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eRibbon, bell, emerald, stamp.\u003c\/i\u003e The words that came from my mother’s mouth thrilled me, like the names of little girls from distant countries or new species of plants. As I listened to her talk, it made me happy to imagine a time when all these things had a place here on the island.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Yet that was also rather difficult to do. The objects in my palm seemed to cower there, absolutely still, like little animals in hibernation, sending me no signal at all. They often left me with an uncertain feeling, as though I were trying to make images of the clouds in the sky out of modeling clay. When I stood before the secret drawers, I felt I had to concentrate on each word my mother said.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e My favorite story was the one about “perfume,” a clear liquid in a small glass bottle. The first time my mother placed it in my hand, I thought it was some sort of sugar water, and I started to bring it to my mouth.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “No, it’s not to drink,” my mother cried, laughing. “You put just a drop on your neck, like this.” Then she carefully dabbed the bottle behind her ear.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “But why would you do that?” I asked, thoroughly puzzled.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Perfume is invisible to the eye, but this little bottle nevertheless contains something quite powerful,” she said.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e I held it up and studied it.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “When you put it on, it has a wonderful smell. It’s a way of charming someone. When I was young, we would use it before we went out with a boy. Choosing the right scent was as important as choosing the right dress—­you wanted the boy to like both. This is the perfume I wore when your father and I were courting. We used to meet at a rose garden on the hill south of town, and I had a terrible time finding a fragrance that wouldn’t be overpowered by the flowers. When the wind rustled my hair, I would give him a look as if to ask whether he’d noticed my perfume.”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e My mother was at her most lively when she talked about this small bottle.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “In those days, everyone could smell perfume. Everyone knew how wonderful it was. But no more. It’s not sold anywhere, and no one wants it. It was disappeared the autumn of the year that your father and I were married. We gathered on the banks of the river with our perfume. Then we opened the bottles and poured out their contents, watching the perfume dissolve in the water like some worthless liquid. Some girls held the bottles up to their noses one last time—­but the ability to smell the perfume had already faded, along with all memory of what it had meant. The river reeked for two or three days afterward, and some fish died. But no one seemed to notice. You see, the very idea of ‘perfume’ had been disappeared from their heads.”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e She looked sad as she finished speaking. Then she gathered me up on her lap and let me smell the perfume on her neck.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Well?” she said.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e But I had no idea what to answer. I could tell that there was some sort of scent there—­like the smell of toasting bread or the chlorine from a swimming pool, yet different—­but no matter how I tried, no other thought came to mind.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e My mother waited, but when I said nothing she sighed quietly.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “To you, this is no more than a few drops of water. But it can’t be helped. It’s all but impossible to recall the things we’ve lost on the island once they’re gone.” And with that, she returned the bottle to its drawer.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e When the clock on the pillar in her studio struck nine, I went up to my room to sleep. My mother returned to work with her hammer and chisel, as the crescent moon shone in the large window.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e As she kissed me good night, I finally asked the question that had been bothering me for some time.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Mama, why do you remember all the things that have been disappeared? Why can you still smell the ‘perfume’ that everyone else has forgotten?”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e She looked out through the window for a moment, gazing at the moon, and then brushed some stone dust from her apron.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “I suppose because I’m always thinking about them,” she said, her voice a bit hoarse.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “But I don’t understand,” I said. “Why are you the only one who hasn’t lost anything? Do you remember everything? Forever?”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e She looked down, as though this were something sad, so I kissed her again to make her feel better.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301888807141,"sku":"NP9781101911815","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781101911815.jpg?v=1767740471","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-memory-police-isbn-9781101911815","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}